The purpose of programming is to do things at scale, to automate them. Writing a one-off Python script to search for the string "widget" is insane when Spotligh

The purpose of programming is to do things at scale, to automate them. Writing a one-off Python script to search for the string "widget" is insane when Spotlight exists. But a script that performs searches is useful when you need to search for a thousand strings. Using the Imagemagick CLI to resize a single image is ridiculously cumbersome when Photoshop exists, but vastly more useful when you need to resize a folder with 50,000 jpegs in it. The reason newbies question the usefulness of trivial examples is because they're trivial problems. Programmer tools are only useful for big problems.