moreutils is a little love letter to the Unix Tools philosophy.
It was interesting to try to find new tools as basic as cat and ls.
With sponge and vidir and ifne and chronic and others, we managed
to find several such tools.
So, it was fun to work on moreutils, but it also ran into inherent problems
with the Unix Tools philosophy. One is namespacing; there are only so many
good short names for commands, and a command like parallel can easily
collide with something else. And since Unix Tools have a bigger surface
area than a pure function, my parallel is not going to be quite compatible
with your parallel, even if they were developed with (erm) parallel
intentions.
Partly due to that problem, I have gotten pickier about adding new tools to moreutils as it's gotten older, and so there's a lot of suggested additions that I will probably never get to.
And as my mention of pure functions suggests, I have kind of moved on from being a big fan of the Unix Tools philosophy. Unix tools are a decent approximation of pure functions for their time, but they are not really pure, and not typed at all, and not usefully namespaced, and this limits them.