why Unix?

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

Jarrett Billingsley wrote:
> 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.

Relax, it ain't.

Andrei