QnD is Quick ‘n Dirty.

Quickly thrown together with dirty code.

I think you’re missing the difference between professional software development and a QnD script thrown together to accomplish a task.

The UNIX philosophy is also related to The Agile Manifesto and “worse is better”.

People are supposed to have the power to solve their problems. Unix provides primitives and tools to people, and they are expected to learn enough to use the system. It’s from a very different time. Well before the “don’t make me think” crowd showed up.

In programming languages, integrating various modules to achieve a goal is already a complex task because we often have to handle numerous failure modes and edge cases.

Now ignore all of the failure modes and edge cases except those that a script is going to directly run into, and that should simplify the requirements. This is “worse is better”.

Perl, Python, and Ruby are supposed to be approachable and easy to get started with. They were never supposed to be industrial programming languages like C, C++, Ada, Pascal, Java, etc., and what you’re noticing is the software industry not understanding there needs to be levels which address the different needs of people. Sometimes people need a simple tool, and not everyone needs to master the professional tool which takes two hours to set up and adjust.

The software industry destroying easy, simple to use software is another discussion.

Yeah, and Unix is built around the paradigm of letting people build the tools they need. People are supposed to be skilled in using the computer as a tool to accomplish tasks.

Originally, IT wasn’t a defined business function. Scientists, accountants, and others, were given access to compute resources, and they were expected to learn the tools to master their jobs. Part of that, was learning how to program the computers.