in reply to A thought about usability in Perl and Linux in general.

It's more of a philosophical difference (google unix way). Toolbox, Filters and Piping are the key concepts at work here - the ability to chain together n number of programs to do what you want.

So while a prompt works great for your environment it rather sucks in a filter/pipe enviroment - the chaining concept breaks down fast if a program within the chain blocks to ask for some input that could have easily been supplied on the command line.

-derby
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Re^2: A thought about usability in Perl and Linux in general.
by tbone1 (Monsignor) on May 19, 2005 at 13:18 UTC
      Toolbox, Filters and Piping are the key concepts at work here - the ability to chain together n number of programs to do what you want.

    That is exactly what I was thinking. Take the classic Unix command line:

      grep -i '^fred' $( ls f*.txt | fgrep -v 42 ) | sed -e's/Baltimore/Glen
+ Burnie/' | troff -mm -rN5 | lpr &

      [download]
    I count six different commands in that statement, and four take no arguments. The Unix philosophy of stringing together smaller utilities into a bigger tool encourage that sort of thing. DOS, which is still the basis of the Windows approach, has/had no such infrastructure to encourage this behavior. In fact, it probably discouraged it.

    It's odd, but I see this affecting the approach to software that we take in my group at work vs another group that is all VB/Java. They mock and fear the command line, while those of us in the Unix world tend to think "Yeah, yeah, just because you don't understand it."

    --
    tbone1, YAPS (Yet Another Perl Schlub)
    And remember, if he succeeds, so what.
    - Chick McGee

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