I can firmly recommend runit if you want a server-focused, reliable init system based on the traditional Unix philosophy.

In many ways, mail server stacks represent a collision between the tools and values of the early internet — self-hosting open source software using well-defined standards and interoperable protocols — and the reality of the modern internet — a few centralized, trusted authorities.

the Unix Philosophy is a crucial part of the patterns, opinions, and culture of Node.js

Nothing about the Unix Philosophy explicitly relates to a culture of software sharing. However, it should be no mystery that it comes from the software community where we argue at length about the best way to make our programs properly Free. Software that is developed according to these principles is easier to share, reuse, repurpose, and maintain.

The Unix Philosophy is an ideology of pragmatism.

Isaac then continues on to compare that philosophy to Node.js. They are slightly less succinct but still very enlightening.

Most users make mistakes while typing, so a backspace key is often useful. This could of course be implemented by the applications themselves, but in accordance with the UNIX design philosophy, applications should be kept as simple as possible. So as a convenience, the operating system provides an editing buffer and some rudimentary editing commands (backspace, erase word, clear line, reprint), which are enabled by default inside the line discipline.

Systemd flies in the face of the Unix philosophy: 'do one thing and do it well,' representing a complex collection of dozens of tightly coupled binaries

Remember that Unix’s forte (or not, depending on your point of view) has always been that it’s a self-hosted operating system designed to make it easy to develop itself, and the result is (still) that advanced system administration often ends up being programming in one way or another. In such a context, exposure to better tools and techniques is good for everyone.

Pipes are great for taking output of one command and transforming it using other commands like jq. They’re a key part of the Unix philosophy of “small sharp tools”: since commands can be chained together with pipes, each command only needs to do one thing and then hand it off to another command.

As I did 20 years ago, I still fervently believe that the only way to make software secure, reliable, and fast is to make it small. Fight Features.

What is missing is a space between the $( and the following (, to avoid the arithmetic expression syntax. The section on command substitution in the shell command language specification actually warns for that: