The design was "strip away as much from Multics to get it running on this crappy computer". That after a few iterations this might generate a philosophy of composition is another matter entirely. And I'm not really arguing against that, at least for a very small subsection of Unix' timeline (around v5-ish?). But the assumption that this was all a masterstroke of, erm, intelligent design seems a bit outlandish.
It seems to have been an element of Plan 9's design, though.
And let's not get into "decades of experience" and "empirically". There's way too few data points and way too much simple economics muddying those waters. By the same argument I could say that Unix really failed, as the biggest applications (nay, the systems themselves) on today's variants are quite monolithic and/or isolated subsystems themselves (browsers, languages, most servers).
The design was "strip away as much from Multics to get it running on this crappy computer". That after a few iterations this might generate a philosophy of composition is another matter entirely. And I'm not really arguing against that, at least for a very small subsection of Unix' timeline (around v5-ish?). But the assumption that this was all a masterstroke of, erm, intelligent design seems a bit outlandish.
It seems to have been an element of Plan 9's design, though.
And let's not get into "decades of experience" and "empirically". There's way too few data points and way too much simple economics muddying those waters. By the same argument I could say that Unix really failed, as the biggest applications (nay, the systems themselves) on today's variants are quite monolithic and/or isolated subsystems themselves (browsers, languages, most servers).