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

Unless your're are talking about Python itself needing
libraries

I meant both, I guess. libs in Python for more applications than just parsing text, which aren't trustworthy (especially for the Python audience) or well-tested; the latter, I actually had an experience recently for OpenWRT where this was the case in that there was this Python script for StevenBlack's hosts, and I ended up writing a simple shell script in lieu of that. I don't even know why that script exists. You're literally just fetching the latest hosts file, appending your blacklist and expunging stuff corresponding to your whitelist. Why invoke Python? especially when OpenWRT, an obvious demographic for that script, doesn't ship with Python. I mean, it only took a minute, but it was weird and dumb.

the initial quick-and-dirty version was a grep-heavy
portable shell script, but it was difficult to add functionality to it

When I was writing my post I was actually thinking about awk while I was writing about grep, but I neglected to mention it. It's kind of funny, isn't it, though? awk is more powerful than grep, but I don't even know if it would scale to your scenario. Both of them are pretty good examples of the more minimalist UNIX programs, and yet, despite being really simple, they simply don't have the longevity that one should expect for their simplicity, nor the generality. They represent specific scopes of use, so it's easy to overlook an intermediate tool like awk.

Having these little programs with their own simple but unique interaction paradigms detailed in a man page seems like an okay idea until you need to rely on it. Youtube-dl is a good example, because its config and its triggers don't 100% match up, which leaves me scratching me head sometimes, and I imagine it's even tougher to comprehend as a novice user. But the alternative is equally as horrifying: this Python package, beets, is great, but it's extended in yaml, and it's absolutely terrible. I mean, just awful. What ended up happening, initially, is that I just end up writing wrappers in bash for all of them, which, ironically, is much more powerful than how they're conventionally configured. And then I switched to Elisp, because I just stopped caring. After all, there's only one true constant in this world: Emacs.