I appreciate your post! I do agree that awk, grep etc. are extremely good tools, and you rarely run into real annoyances with them (actual scientific software

I appreciate your post! I do agree that awk, grep etc. are extremely good tools, and you rarely run into real annoyances with them (actual scientific software is a completely different bag of problems that suffers from different problems). Still, there's lots of room for improvement even in the good tools [1] and I feel like it's easy to stop thinking about the problem space, and shut out others who don't immediately grok what's going and why you've now run "apt-get update" instead of "apt-get upgrade". Many posts in this thread show that attitude. I do think at some point we'll get easier systems - git has now overtaken cvs in popularity so these tools aren't set in stone, even though both aren't easy to understand for beginners, git is just more powerful. I see people write tiny Python scripts instead of using bash-tools to manipulate folders and files, I think that is a case of taking up a tool because it's easier to use. Are there other tools that are slowly fading out? I feel like awk is on the way out but that may be my echo-chamber. >We do our industry a grave disservice by not teaching this stuff somewhere in our education system. I fully agree - I think that some hands-on programming, understanding and refactoring experience is much more important than knowing how to write the code to keep a b-tree balanced. The first is something you have to do every few weeks - the latter is something you do only once or twice, if ever (even though it's a cool application of recursive thought). The first will make you a more valuable member of the workforce. [1] One example: when I teach people git I struggle to show the man-pages because nothing in there makes sense until you've truly understood how git works under the hood