Quoted in the IBM employee magazine Think in 1979. Cited by his Associated Press obituary http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17704662/
“This is the Unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.”
Doug McIlroy (2003). The Art of Unix Programming: Basics of the Unix Philosophy http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Doug McIlroy 6
American computer scientist, mathematician, engineer, and p… 1932Related quotes
                                        
                                         A Free Digital Society - What Makes Digital Inclusion Good or Bad? http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-digital-society.html#education; Lecture at Sciences Po in Paris (19 October 2011)] 
2010s
                                    
“Portability is for people who cannot write new programs.”
                                        
                                         Post to comp.os.minix newsgroup, 1992-01-29, Torvalds, Linus, 2006-08-28 http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=1992Jan29.231426.20469%40klaava.Helsinki.FI, According to Torvalds, this was "tongue in cheek" (Ibid.) 
1990s, 1991-94
                                    
“So? If you don't like it, write your own [program].”
                                        
                                        1995/10 
About Code
                                    
A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003), The Simplest Thing that Could Possibly Work
Itconversations.com http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail58.html quoted in www.dasgenie.com http://www.dasgenie.com/scrap/archives/000060.html
A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003), The Simplest Thing that Could Possibly Work
“Many programs don’t have well-defined interface. They should have.”
The forgotten advantage of concurrent programming
Doug McIlroy (2003). The Art of Unix Programming: The Elements of Operating-System Style http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch03s01.html
Source: Interview from Programmers at Work (1986)