Oh, heh, if you were expecting a defense of the "UNIX philosophy" of doing one thing well from me, you're not going to get it. I think one small step by one small step that has been abandoned over time, and because it was so incremental there's no one place to point at where it went over the line and it's easy for people to miss it because there is no such point, but cross the line it has.
Now, at least GNU ls doesn't send or receive email or something. A quick scan of its man page doesn't show many any features grossly out of line with its primary task. But yeah, it has a lot of features for sure, many of which nominally overlap with tasks that could be done by other tools (sort, ignoring backups, -D ("generate output designed for Emacs' dired mode", lol), quoting styles...).
I feel much the same way about Python. Very little of its philosophy expressed back around 2000 or so is in effect today. And there's no one release you can point at and say, "this is it, this is when it stopped being simple", yet, clearly, today it is no longer simple.
The "UNIX philosophy" gets cargo cult by younger generations thanks to a couple of statements in a few worshipped books, yet there is hardly any UNIX clone post V6 where it was actually followed upon.
