[ighost]

kinda banal if you ask me. it's two simple tools that do approximately the same thing. even grep vs ack would be more interesting.

no offense to the authors of course, they did a great job in both cases.

[sorbits]

As someone who have always used curl and wondered why I often see wget quoted in READMEs (as how to obtain some remote file), I quite enjoyed reading the write-up.

My take-away was that a) I am not missing out by staying with curl and b) the use of wget is likely due to being part of GNU.

[ZeroGravitas]

You did notice this was written by curl's author? I only noticed after I read it and without that knowledge thought it was rather a pathetically biased article.

But you can't expect developers to be impartial about their own code and it was my fault for not noticing the disclaimer the first time. It reads completely different with that framing in mind, but still if I was looking for the definitive reason that one tool was recommended over another I'd consider the point of view of the developers as a starting point rather than an open and shut case.

[Maskawanian]

I use wget for one shot downloads because it is less to type. I use libcURL when developing.

This is the difference between "wget http://www.google.ca/ and "curl -O http://www.google.ca/

Just a simple small but significant difference.

[AlisdairO]

Well, plus the recursive download facilities. This is the reason why I mostly use wget on the command line, although I'd use curl in scripts.

[arethuza]

I'm pretty sure awk is Turing Complete while grep isn't.

[ZeroGravitas]

He said ack, not awk:

"ack is a tool like grep, designed for programmers with large trees of heterogeneous source code."

http://betterthangrep.com/