The sad or happy truth is that thanks to advances in computing power, what used to be dummy toy programming is now not only a valid way of doing things but the

The sad or happy truth is that thanks to advances in computing power, what used to be dummy toy programming is now not only a valid way of doing things but the correct one. Using made up stats, slurping the entire output of a process in a big string would fail 99% of the times 30 years ago, 50% of the times 20 years ago, 1% of the times 10 years ago, but less than 0.01% of the time now. You'd waste your time doing it 'the right way'. So it is with most simple data processing. If your goal is just to ship a product fast, you no longer need the old type of smart programmers; nowadays, smart means doing it fast and badly.