why Unix?

[Christopher Wright]

Jarrett Billingsley wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 11:09 AM, Christopher Wright <dhasenan at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> In this regard, Unix has a standard interface: text. This turns out to be
>> usable >90% of the time. It has the advantage that you can write a program
>> in any language that can process text. But it has disadvantages, too.
> 
> Sure, as long as you're comfortable using a slew of
> incredibly-hard-to-read (and hard to write) domain-specific languages,
> e.g. sed, grep, and to a large extent Perl.  Even if you're fluent in
> those languages, you still have to know what the format of the data is
> that they're parsing, and what all the pieces mean.

Sed? I only know one command, and two options. It uses regular 
expressions, which I already use everywhere.

Grep? I only ever use two or three options. It uses regular expressions.

Perl? I don't know it at all.

The only other text processing language I've used is awk. I barely use 
it, and when I do, I only use one command.

I could learn all that in an hour. Probably more like ten minutes, but 
an hour would certainly suffice.

With Powershell, you need to be familiar with the tools for dealing with 
System.Data.DataTable or whatever. Maybe it would only take ten minutes. 
The most time it could save in that regard is an hour.

The cost of learning is not a significant factor here. You might have 
plenty of other good arguments (and I offered some), but this isn't one 
of them.