The pipe was technically trivial, but profound in its effect.
However, it would not have been trivial without the fundamental
unifying notion of the process as an autonomous unit of computation,
with process control being programmable. As in Multics, a shell was
just another process; process control did not come from God inscribed
in JCL.
--Doug McIlroy
If an operating system makes spawning new processes expensive
and/or process control is difficult and inflexible, you'll usually see
all of the following consequences:
Monster monoliths become a more natural way of programming.
To design the perfect anti-Unix, make process-spawning very
expensive, make process control difficult and inflexible, and
leave IPC as an unsupported or half-supported afterthought.
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