Thanks for this article. A few years ago I had a task involving reading some data files to understand whether they were corrupted or still usable. The software

Thanks for this article. A few years ago I had a task involving reading some data files to understand whether they were corrupted or still usable. The software to read the files usually came as part of a proprietary package with a price tag high enough that it made no sense to license for this one small task. I asked myself: "how hard can it be?" I decided to search online for easy and free ways to read the files. It had been several years since I last programmed anything though I had done a bit of script modifications on some perl/awk/sed scripts. I found Tcl/Tk after a bit of digging and decided to give it a whirl. In all I spent about 16 hours dinking around with Tcl and had a nice, short program written to read everything, display the data for a QC check, and write it to disk. The documentation was detailed and concise. Of all the programming languages that I have used over the years the fact that I could sit down and find the right set of simple commands and assemble all of it into a working program in a couple of days with no learning curve pain or friction was amazing. Thanks John Ousterhout.