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by jimbokun 1372 days ago
> Pipe this into that and through seven pieces of software that sound like glibgcd, add 8 arcane flags and in the end you have some kind of textfile that would've just as easily been made in some handmade program? What exactly is the selling point for devs?

No, that's exactly the selling point.

Yes, you could write some hand made program. And piping software together IS a kind of hand made program. It's just going to be far faster to write that pipeline, than to write a custom program, deploy, and run it.

And the pipeline might be much much faster. A classic example:

https://adamdrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-...

1 comments

>Yes, you could write some hand made program. And piping software together IS a kind of hand made program. It's just going to be far faster to write that pipeline, than to write a custom program, deploy, and run it.

I suppose the speed of implementation depends entirely on your available experience. If I were to try to reproduce the data processing pipeline in your link, it would take me hours to get to this line "cat *.pgn | grep "Result" | sort | uniq -c", and would probably never be able to get to any of the further steps.

Meanwhile, with my experience, I would've been able to write a 5 minute C# program that does exactly the same data processing. I don't know if it'd go down all the way to 12 seconds of execution time without serious effort, but I'm pretty sure it would handily beat the version I could write using the commandline.

If this task is a single time kind of thing, the C# program more than suffices. If it's a many times kind of thing, I'd strongly prefer having it in C# code, so I can more easily adjust it and make it part of a larger automated workflow which will mostly consist of other C# code.

Well sure. If you only know one tool and don’t invest in learning anything else, of course you’ll be faster implementing solutions in it than anything else.