I initially agreed with your take there but I actually think they’re a great argument for their point. head and tail are the exact same abstraction. Their implementations will be quite different, but they both serve “provided this data, give me these lines”. Consider instead that these are simply operations on arrays and actually they map perfectly to Python slices: data[:10] and data[-10:]. This abstraction mapping also shows that, imo, the tool should provide data[n:m] and it would still be entirely consistent with the Unix philosophy. In fact, this tool exists in the Unix toolkit: sed -n n,mp. Three tools then are currently required for the simple concept of “slice lines”. I also think it’s a bit of a mess. You could replace head with sed fairly easily: sed -n '1,10p' but not tail (it is possible, but quite slow and very opaque)

As an aside I actually found this quite frustrating myself because I don’t like reaching for sed in the n:m case (I always forget and end up piping head to tail) and ended up writing my own tool for essentially this style of slicing input, also replacing probably my least favorite use of my least favorite Unix tool, dd, to slice arbitrary byte sequences. The tool doesn’t feel overloaded and I use it quite often.

(I’m sure many people have written this same tool. There is probably a widely known open source option that I’ve just never come across)