thank you for this. i've never understood why credit cards are printed w/ spaces between the numbers, presumably to reduce transcription errors, but 99.9% of web forms force you to enter the number without any spaces.
It would be very useful to delineate this list by command type and availability. The ones I wanted to check out (ndiff, rs, iftop, mtr, ...) must be in packages, since they don't respond in either OS X or vanilla Debian.
I should think OCaml or SML should be added to the mix. Neither has Async built in, but the other points are handled quite well. http://ocaml.org/description.html
It's been sad to watch Markdown eclipse Textile http://txstyle.org in popularity. Textile provides a more complete mapping to HTML than Markdown, while remaining easy to use.
Its primary flaw is translating line breaks into HTML line breaks. Per the article's criticisms, it too lacks a formal spec and supports embedded HTML.
Beyond complexity management, breaking a design into many small programs opens it up to a rich set of well-known and proven OS services. Things like hardware memory protection, multi-processor support, queues, mutexes, monitoring, and cross language support. I'll take Unix over some language+standard library _any day_.