As the poster above said, one man's bloat is another man's essential feature.
Back to the subject: reading those old sources really learns you why, back in the seventies, people found Unix so appealing. even ignoring the feature growth/creep (or whatever you want to call it), you do not have to wade through a zillion copyright header lines, option parsing that goes on for ages, locale-specific stuff, etc, before getting to the meat of the program. Disadvantage is that some code dives into assembler fairly quickly (for example, printf is mostly assembly in the system I refer to above)
As the poster above said, one man's bloat is another man's essential feature.
Back to the subject: reading those old sources really learns you why, back in the seventies, people found Unix so appealing. even ignoring the feature growth/creep (or whatever you want to call it), you do not have to wade through a zillion copyright header lines, option parsing that goes on for ages, locale-specific stuff, etc, before getting to the meat of the program. Disadvantage is that some code dives into assembler fairly quickly (for example, printf is mostly assembly in the system I refer to above)