4 ms·

At my office, I would be very angry if I encounter your tool. That would mean that the guy who has brought it was too lazy to learn the proper way and makes me

by webreac 14y ago

At my office, I would be very angry if I encounter your tool. That would mean that the guy who has brought it was too lazy to learn the proper way and makes me waste my time learning how to use a useless tool. Your tool has no advantage over standard unix tools, it is just limited to a reduced number of use cases. This kind of tools does not favour improvement of skills or good practice. I think this is the cause of the strong reactions. On the other hand, your program seems well coded and I may use it when I need to code something similar in javascript. Thank you for open sourcing it. I think you should update your README.md file in order to indicate the proper way of doing things and to discourage the use of it for any other purpose than learning.

eropple 14y ago
I think you should update your README.md file in order to indicate the proper way of doing things and to discourage the use of it for any other purpose than learning. Ack isn't a "standard unix tool" either. I use it all the time. You're being a presumptuous asshole in telling her to discourage the use of it just because you don't like it. I get that you're trying to be nice. You're not succeeding. You're being the problem. Stop.
- webreac 14y ago
  In my work I have always to go from one computer to another one (to analyse software problems). Sometimes I need to ask a developer to come on site to give a look to the behaviour of its code. It occurs very often that very good developers are completely lost when they arrive on a computer where all their marvellous customizations and shortcuts are missing. Many developer are always on the same environment. They can use their own tailored tools and may not need many of the basic unix knowledge. I think that good practices should be encouraged. The good practices improve the skill of people and reduce the costs at the society level. The basic knowledge of unix tool has an exponential rewarding effect (by learning a couple of new tips, you can solve many new needs). This tool facilitates the avoidance of these good practices. I do not like people ignorance and I favour knowledge. I do not like losing time (except on HN) and I favour speed. I admit, this is a personal opinion. We do not have much time to learn everything. I think the time spend learning "replace" should better be spend learning "sed". Try to use sed each time it is not longer than opening a text editor and doing a find and replace manually. This way you will not lose your skill. Ack is not a basic tool you have chosen to avoid learning grep. All the basic options of grep are the same in ack. As a result you will not loose skill by using ack.
  - pekk 14y ago
    Which shell commands you use is a micro-detail. There is a surplus of shell commands, most of the features of which go unused. Meanwhile, some people are coding on Windows or an Apple platform and not using any of this. It really doesn't matter. This is nothing but justifying wanting people to do things the same way you do, without being able to explain why it is actually better.
    - webreac 14y ago
      Reread what I wrote. I have been moded down enough for giving my opinion about why this additional shell command can makes people angry. There are perhaps many young developers here that are fed-up listening to old ones telling them to learn basic unix way. I can understand them, but this is not a sufficient reason to reinvent the wheel without improvements, or to negate the obvious.
shaurz 14y ago
The so-called standard unix tools are just historical artefacts, there's nothing particularly special about them other than they were the first. sed is an arcane language which in my personal opinion is not worth learning (maybe it was for you), and for all but the most trivial tasks it's probably a better idea to use a proper language like Python. After all, the whole reason for Perl's existence was that sed/awk/sh were lacking.
- webreac 14y ago
  I am a perl lover. I fully adhere to the idea that perl (or python or ruby or javascript) should be used instead of sed/awk/sh/grep/find each time we need to go beyond the basic usage of these commands. I have never said that everybody should know the arcane parts of sed (http://uuner.doslash.org/forfun/sedtris.sed http://uuner.doslash.org/forfun/sedtris.sed). The unix tools work best when they are combined together (with pipes). The basic usage of sed is very useful to combine unix commands. Knowing the basics of standard unix tools has always been a time saver for me. Here is an example of a command that I may need in some unusual cases: for i in $(awk '/PWP/{print $1}' machines) ; do echo $i; rsh $i df . ; done In my case, it does not worth being a script, because I may not have the same need before a month or two. Without unix tools, this would be a pain in the ass.

by webreac 14y ago

eropple 14y ago

I think you should update your README.md file in order to indicate the proper way of doing things and to discourage the use of it for any other purpose than learning. Ack isn't a "standard unix tool" either. I use it all the time. You're being a presumptuous asshole in telling her to discourage the use of it just because you don't like it. I get that you're trying to be nice. You're not succeeding. You're being the problem. Stop.

webreac 14y ago
In my work I have always to go from one computer to another one (to analyse software problems). Sometimes I need to ask a developer to come on site to give a look to the behaviour of its code. It occurs very often that very good developers are completely lost when they arrive on a computer where all their marvellous customizations and shortcuts are missing. Many developer are always on the same environment. They can use their own tailored tools and may not need many of the basic unix knowledge. I think that good practices should be encouraged. The good practices improve the skill of people and reduce the costs at the society level. The basic knowledge of unix tool has an exponential rewarding effect (by learning a couple of new tips, you can solve many new needs). This tool facilitates the avoidance of these good practices. I do not like people ignorance and I favour knowledge. I do not like losing time (except on HN) and I favour speed. I admit, this is a personal opinion. We do not have much time to learn everything. I think the time spend learning "replace" should better be spend learning "sed". Try to use sed each time it is not longer than opening a text editor and doing a find and replace manually. This way you will not lose your skill. Ack is not a basic tool you have chosen to avoid learning grep. All the basic options of grep are the same in ack. As a result you will not loose skill by using ack.
- pekk 14y ago
  Which shell commands you use is a micro-detail. There is a surplus of shell commands, most of the features of which go unused. Meanwhile, some people are coding on Windows or an Apple platform and not using any of this. It really doesn't matter. This is nothing but justifying wanting people to do things the same way you do, without being able to explain why it is actually better.
  - webreac 14y ago
    Reread what I wrote. I have been moded down enough for giving my opinion about why this additional shell command can makes people angry. There are perhaps many young developers here that are fed-up listening to old ones telling them to learn basic unix way. I can understand them, but this is not a sufficient reason to reinvent the wheel without improvements, or to negate the obvious.

shaurz 14y ago

The so-called standard unix tools are just historical artefacts, there's nothing particularly special about them other than they were the first. sed is an arcane language which in my personal opinion is not worth learning (maybe it was for you), and for all but the most trivial tasks it's probably a better idea to use a proper language like Python. After all, the whole reason for Perl's existence was that sed/awk/sh were lacking.

webreac 14y ago
I am a perl lover. I fully adhere to the idea that perl (or python or ruby or javascript) should be used instead of sed/awk/sh/grep/find each time we need to go beyond the basic usage of these commands. I have never said that everybody should know the arcane parts of sed (http://uuner.doslash.org/forfun/sedtris.sed http://uuner.doslash.org/forfun/sedtris.sed). The unix tools work best when they are combined together (with pipes). The basic usage of sed is very useful to combine unix commands. Knowing the basics of standard unix tools has always been a time saver for me. Here is an example of a command that I may need in some unusual cases: for i in $(awk '/PWP/{print $1}' machines) ; do echo $i; rsh $i df . ; done In my case, it does not worth being a script, because I may not have the same need before a month or two. Without unix tools, this would be a pain in the ass.