Re: Grumble...
"Alf P. Steinbach /Usenet" <alf.p.steinbach+usenet@gmail.com>
A person who always used Visual Studio multi-find or always used grep (or
Windows' findstr), choosing the tool irrespective of the task, would be
effectively incompetent. Thus, it's an invalid dilemma: if it is accepted
as valid, then no matter which of the two options is chosen, the person
must be incompetent, someone choosing to struggle needlessly just because
of a fixation on given tool or toolset. A competent person uses the
available tools best fit for a task, acquires such tools, or if necessary
creates a suitable tool.
Ah, now we're getting somewhere.
And creating a tool is mostly what the *nix tools are about, namely
creating special purpose tools
Well, sort of.
The said tools are (mostly) not good for anything alone. So indeed they are
there as lego elements building something else.
But that does not imply that they do any particularly good job for a task.
That is what I said elsewhere -- for windows you can obtain way more
assembled tools so there is less reason to build your own. Also the programs
around development are much better to cover the regular workflows. And for
tool building there are also elements that are not worse.
For that reason compenency is better measured with the primary values (from
the quote on top), without mentioning any particular tool or technlogy as a
marker.
such as install scripts, or even throwaway one-liners, as opposed to MS'
idea of using canned slightly parameterized functionality.
Huh? MS won most of the marked by making abot ALL its tools *scriptable*.
From quite the beginning. MS Word for dos had cool macros and not that
cool, still usable language. Then Winword introduced the superior WordBasic
in the first version, with full access to stuff well beyond just the text.
Then it evolved to general VBA uniformly usable the same way with all its
tools.
Hope you don't want to compare abilities and the mundane "language' of
whichever unix shell with it...
Canned functionality is good when it's applicable, bad when you need
something even slightly outside its parameters.
Sure, but having a rich canned functionality in company of powerful and
universal means to call into anything is IMNSHO superior to having just
basic bricks and a supposed glue that was hacked together without much
thought to either desing or implementation. (that unix shell went so to the
extreme to inspire the IOCCC...)