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by runjake
1920 days ago
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I don't know. I already have them (shell, shell utils, Python, Go, jq, JS, Ansible, etc). I do what you mentioned all day, every day. I don't like the idea of "a more general product" because that's the power of the tools I use, they are small tools designed to do one or a few things only, but I can chain them together to do complex things. And if one of my small tools doesn't work for a particular task, I can swap it out with or write another small tool. With your "CSV-like" example, I'd probably do something like grep with a regex to check a line and see if it has more than $x commas, and if it does process the line, if it doesn't ignore it and move on to the next. I am about to head to a meeting, but something like this: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/249071/check-if-a-s... |
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But! If you look at it from the perspective of someone who is a non-software developer (e.g. scientist, accountant, graphic designer, etc.) who just wants to do a specific task, it makes more sense to have dedicated tools for the job. Even if those tools, under the hood, are a combination of smaller tools, the end user should not be concerned with anything other than his/her field of expertise.
With my question I was trying to get some insight into people's (who are not necessarily software devs) workflows and how we can improve those workflows (if we can).
The question applies to software development as well: someone who is specialized, say in compilers (broadly speaking), for example, can help the workflow of many who don't have the time / resources to do it themselves. It comes to mind a feature that someone posted above: "List what packages have functions that can get called when I call function X".