I think you misunderstand me. Program composability is the property of being able to compose programs together, not to write a program from scratch. And the philosophy of unix command line is that pretty much everything is a CSV or fixed-width data file. Which is fine until you try to do something with a config file. Basically, the unix toolchain has a really nasty text processing gap between awk and yacc, which perl, to a certain extent, filled. Filled at the expense of throwing away the unix philosophy.

As they said in the UHH, Unix doesn't have a philosophy, it has an attitude. :)