I don't know.

When I got my first serious job, I observed people logging into machines with rlogin instead of telnet despite (as I knew) the latter's being the newer protocol. "It's faster that way", they said, and at the time I couldn't make any sense why. It took me a while, but I finally figured it out: they were invoking it as rlogin -l theiruser, thus saving themselves from the interactive prompt for a username. (Many of them had also rigged up .rhosts files, so they didn't need a password, either.)

Unix folks tend to prefer batch operations for things they are already familiar with. It's not just repeatability. There's something to say for the "don't bother me" attitude against computers (and not, of course, against humans). Well-designed computer systems *shouldn't* bother us.

It becomes complicated when the same system serves both newcomers and power users. The web, unfortunately, is not a very programmatic environment, despite its success. Modules like HTTP::Recorder and WWW::Mechanize are indeed a great improvement over manual screen-scraping, but they're no match against a good API.

Don't forget that spreadsheets and word processors have been around for over twenty years now. They certainly have their markets, but ask yourself this: how popular are the (recording and) macro facilities in, say, Word? How many people do you know who can record or write a macro to... say, enbolden the first word in each list item? Consider that this is easy to do in Perl — once you know how. Not that I think it's hard to do with macros, but the scantiness of people who *can* do it is telling.

In reply to Re: Spreadsheets, HTTP::Recorder and interactivity by gaal
in thread Spreadsheets, HTTP::Recorder and interactivity by zby

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