One of the funnier things about this profession is how so many things are cyclical. Language mavens are fond of saying that every programming language eventually turns into a poor copy of Lisp, and every 10 years or so there is another format for encoding data so that the machines will have some ideas of how to process it (ASN.1 was XML before XML was born)
So I was tickled to read about Taco Bell Programming, where Ted Dziuba describes how to do web crawling and MapReduce with UNIX utilities. It rang true, especially given the current situation at The Job, where new tech is being enthroned. Then I found Mike The Coder's post about his reaction and Ted's response, which was even better. I find new things about the OS every time I look, and there are great ways to do most tasks already in place. But every generation needs to invent its own set of tools before it learns that much of what they want is already there,
It's almost like the end of The Wizard of Oz, where Glinda tells Dorothy that she would not have believed that the ruby slippers would take her home before she experienced the magic in Oz.
Heck, given the number of flying monkey's I've worked with, that's more apt that I care to think about.....
So I was tickled to read about Taco Bell Programming, where Ted Dziuba describes how to do web crawling and MapReduce with UNIX utilities. It rang true, especially given the current situation at The Job, where new tech is being enthroned. Then I found Mike The Coder's post about his reaction and Ted's response, which was even better. I find new things about the OS every time I look, and there are great ways to do most tasks already in place. But every generation needs to invent its own set of tools before it learns that much of what they want is already there,
It's almost like the end of The Wizard of Oz, where Glinda tells Dorothy that she would not have believed that the ruby slippers would take her home before she experienced the magic in Oz.
Heck, given the number of flying monkey's I've worked with, that's more apt that I care to think about.....
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