Jarrett Billingsley wrote:
On Tue, Apr 7, 2009 at 12:38 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu
<seewebsiteforem...@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
