All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Perl is #1

jonasbn on 2004-05-12T14:07:18

In this article listing a top 10 of tools, Perl is rated #1.

Some of the other tools in the article are a bit wierd, but I guess all would have their own personal top 10 of favorite tools.

I think mine (just of the top of my head) would look something like:

1. Perl 2. Terminal.app or xterm 3. BBEdit 4. Vim 5. grep (and variations) 6. find 7. xargs 8. bash 9. telnet 10. OS X

The list might look different tomorrow

My tools

jdavidb on 2004-05-12T18:27:47

I wouldn't have ordinarily considered the terminal a tool; to me it's more like air. Gotta have it to work. :)

I'm kind of surprised to think of what I would list as my most important tools today. If you'd told me this a few years back I never would have guessed it.

  1. Perl (of course)
  2. Cygwin
  3. Cygwin XFree86
  4. ssh
  5. vim (I tried to convert to Emacs in 2002 but got distracted when I was laid off)
  6. CVS (only recently have I finally become an avid CVS user, despite plans to do so for four years
  7. a spreadsheet program; I deliberately cite this generically, even though I am currently using the most popular proprietary spreadsheet package, because to me they are all the same

Just for fun, I typed:

history | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n
on the system I use most and found the following (excerpted):
  • 8 du
  • 10 rm
  • 14 more
  • 23 perl5.6.1 (I always type the version number because of systems I've been on where I had to use multiple versions; yes, it stinks that I'm using 5.6.1; it's not by choice)
  • 24 su
  • 26 grep
  • 27 sqlplus
  • 38 ls
  • 44 cd (that's not a tool; it's a shell builtin :) )
  • 69 cvs
  • 93 vi

It was interesting to me, at any rate. vi is vim, of course. I wasn't surprised to see it and cvs come out on top.

Re:My tools

cog on 2004-05-13T10:56:48

I was using this...

cat .bash_history|perl -ne 'm/^[a-z]+/&&$_{$&}++&&$t++}for(sort{$_{$a}$_{$b}}keys%_){$c++;print sprintf"$_\t$_{$_}\t%2.2f%\n",($_{$_}*100/$t)'

Re:My tools

cog on 2004-05-13T13:52:40

Which is very, very stupid, now that I look at the code... :-|

Man... did I really do that? :-| When? :-| How? :-| Why??? :-|

Re:My tools

larsen on 2004-05-15T17:10:14

Until tool number 6, I can guess what your daily work deals with, but when you cite spreadsheets, I don't have ideas about how you use them. I am always interested in ways to increase productivity and limit efforts: what do you use spreadsheets for?

Re:My tools

jdavidb on 2004-05-24T15:07:34

Heh. Mostly for reporting my todo list and status to my boss. :) But also as an output format for my users and stuff like that. To be honest, I don't personally use them for much that could be described as technical.

Reviewing my tool list, it also doesn't show the large usage of Oracle.

screen

mary.poppins on 2004-05-12T19:30:48

screen

Once you get used to it, it too is "like air".