Greatest Software Ever Written 4235

I feel so crippled when working on a Windows box. Forget perl, lex, etc. - I haven't had time to learn them. But not even having grep (FIND is horribly broken) is a tragedy exceeded only by DOS-Win's bletcherous lack of pipes, and wildcarding that is Broken As Designed...

But I forget - I'm not supposed to be using those things anyway. I'm supposed to get my hands of that damned keyboard and do the point-and-drool thing like everybody else. One of my paranoid fantasies is that M$ is deliberately crippling their command-line interface to discourage people from using it.

I don't know that acronym, but I suspect I agree with it as much as I do the rest of your sentence. You're right - who cares about robustness? Reboot, reformat, re-install, ad nausaeum.

Writing software that runs reliably in such an environment is a real challenge.

It's the typical bureaucratic solution: deal with complexity by piling more complexity on top of it. Wasn't it Blaise Pascal who started a letter by apologizing for not having the time to write a shorter one?

I love being able to rip out handfuls of code and replace it with a line or two that is more readable, efficient, reliable, and maintainable. But I have to keep looking over my shoulder for those enraged bandaid manufacturers... :-)

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