why Unix?

[Jarrett Billingsley]

On Tue, Apr 7, 2009 at 12:38 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu
<SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:
> I'll risk an example. A while ago my wife was looking for a place for her
> medical residency. There was an online service that would give her a long
> webpage with links to all institutions she was interested in. The links were
> in the hundreds. She had to click each, then a couple of others, then look
> through their program highlights to see some details she was interested in.
> Getting back or opening in new window were difficult due to some Javascript
> (of which disabling messed things up). All in all it was a very tedious
> task.
>
> It took me a couple of minutes to write under her eyes a script that
> downloaded HTML, scraped the code for links, followed those of interest, and
> output a concatenation of all pages she was interested in, with details
> highlighted, that was loadable back in the browser. I'd show her one
> iteration, get feedback, and get the next iteration within seconds. All
> without "coding" in any sense as regularly understood by Windows
> programmers.

I did pretty much the exact same thing in Python on Windows.  For that
matter, if it's bash scripting that really sets Unix apart from
Windows, well no thanks, I'll have no part in it.  It's a horrible
language.  I rank it lower than PHP.  Virtually any other scripting
language is better, and they're all cross-platform.