[ksherlock]

Let's say I create a new, interpreted language. It's called fgrep and it only has a couple instructions for searching text. But I spend 5 years optimizing those functions.

Now, if you need recursively search through a directory full of text files, would you use fgrep or would you write your own "high performance" search utility with a hard-coded (none of that slow run-time interpreting!) list of files and needle?