[pierrebai]

The sad or happy truth is that thanks to advances in computing power, what used to be dummy toy programming is now not only a valid way of doing things but the correct one.

Using made up stats, slurping the entire output of a process in a big string would fail 99% of the times 30 years ago, 50% of the times 20 years ago, 1% of the times 10 years ago, but less than 0.01% of the time now. You'd waste your time doing it 'the right way'.

So it is with most simple data processing. If your goal is just to ship a product fast, you no longer need the old type of smart programmers; nowadays, smart means doing it fast and badly.