Also shell pipelines are very flexible, but there is a limit of what you can achieve with this approach. This complexity limit is the reason why they invented more flexible scripting languages like perl and python.
Python (and any other general purpose languages) shouldn't be considered a replacement for shell pipelines but rather an extension tool. Actually, the pipelines survived 50 years in big
part due to how easy to extend them: just define something that can read from stream of bytes, and write to another one (use what ever language you like).
The origin of composing simple programs that do one thing well is likely was originated as the consequence of the introduction of shell pipelines (or the genius pre-designed property).
Pipelines is a good example of "less is more" concept.
Perl was the other language mentioned and it was in fact marketed as the One Tool to Rule, with examples given of how to replace your "complex and brittle" shell pipelines with a few lines of Perl.
I think people genuinely get confused that the century that has dates like 19XX was the 20th century, so they say "1900s" to cover for it. But that has an established meaning, namely 1900-1909.
> But that has an established meaning, namely 1900-1909.
I'm not going to claim to know the history of how terminology develops. But I don't think I have ever come across someone using "XX00s" to refer solely to the first 10 years of that time period.
The general rule of thumb for reading numbers is to treat every trailing 0 as a marker of an insignificant figure, so a number like "1,000,000" is presumed to have 1 significant figure and not 6. By this rule, the most natural interpretation of 1900s is that it encompasses 1900-1999.
A word or phrase doesn't really have a single established meaning if enough people use it to mean something else. Unless we're talking about "literally", in which case the damn kids had better get off my lawn.
"But that has an established meaning, namely 1900-1909"
Not to anyone I have ever known. I have never before this post today heard anyone say that "the nineteen hundreds" means 1900-1909. It always refers to 1900-1999.
I've only ever heard of 1900-1909 referred to as "the aughts" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aughts ) - which, admittedly, always sounded weird to me, but I wasn't alive then.
