Re:Don Libes' Expect: A Surprisingly Underappreciated Unix A...
by chriswarbo on Thursday December 08, 2016 @11:33AM
(#13131481)
I think of it in the same way as screen scraping Web pages, or writing buffer-heavy Emacs Lisp:
- If there are alternatives, they'll usually be better
- It'll still be around when there are no alternatives
- Some tasks (e.g. "toggle foo mode") are inherently easier than others (e.g. "press up five times and hope that's enough")
- Some tasks need frequent maintenance and tweaking (e.g. as i/o formats change, program features are added/rearranged, shell environments are tweaked, etc.)
- Some tasks work so well that they're taken for granted for a decade, and it's only when you want to tweak some part that you remember how truly horrifying the implementation is ;)
- If there are alternatives, they'll usually be better
- It'll still be around when there are no alternatives
- Some tasks (e.g. "toggle foo mode") are inherently easier than others (e.g. "press up five times and hope that's enough")
- Some tasks need frequent maintenance and tweaking (e.g. as i/o formats change, program features are added/rearranged, shell environments are tweaked, etc.)
- Some tasks work so well that they're taken for granted for a decade, and it's only when you want to tweak some part that you remember how truly horrifying the implementation is ;)