let's see these guys implement diff

One of our clients fucked up some configs so I had to go in and fix it. Easy task right? Copy diff.exe, check fuckups, done. WRONG. First you have to find a differ.

Why is it impossible to write a good software, compile it to a single binary and be done with it. Why do we have to make everything so complicated. File1 left, file2 right, changes blue, additions green, removals red. Nobody needs a mongolian translation nor cool icons nor 3way compare. Fuckk off imbed the images and translations in the binary if you can't help yourself.

I went with a legacy version of some differ the newer versions come with 3 dlls, 20 translation files, a phat coc, a copy of 7zip and fucking cygwin and the newest version can't even be used without an installer.

FUCK SOFTWARE

>>12

You can always write a script for grep; whereas, were you to reinvent the wheel with Python or whatever, you need libraries, and the end result may be too inscrutable for its worth.

FIOC has good enough text-processing tools in its stdlib. not as many as Perl, but arguably much more readable. Unless your're are talking about Python itself needing libraries - that's true, and I'd argue there's a cut-off point (either with performance or with complexity) before which you should use *nix tools and after which you should switch to an actual language.

for example, I once needed to write a tool which processed a lot of Smali files (disassembled Android bytecode). the initial quick-and-dirty version was a grep-heavy portable shell script, but it was difficult to add functionality to it, and on larger projects (larger as in 'after disassembling literally all the code you have on a modern phone') it would take over half an hour to run. I rewrote it in Java 8 (don't judge, it offered a decent speed - unlike scripting langs - without the need to reinvent the wheel of text processing - as in C; I guess I could have done it in sepples, but I'd argue Java is the lesser evil here) and it took less than a minute.