Yes, some tasks can be done very simply, and decent programmers know this. I've written lots of Twitter-accessing code to do data analysis, but I love using the ruby-t gem, which lets me in a single line of UNIX (with pipes) do something like unfollow every user I currently follow who tweets more than 50 times/day and doesn't follow me back.
The OP is railing against dumb programmers...OK, that's fine. But just because I've heard of Josef Mengele doesn't mean that it's a good use of time to continually rant about the dangers of science.
Speaking of bioinformatics, one of my favorite programming blogs is from bioinformatics scientist Neil Saunders, who writes about scripts, complex and short, that he uses to data munge and efficiently run experiments. The title of his blog was inspired by an encounter he had with a fellow scientist who did not see the value of programming:
> You may be wondering about the title of this blog.
Early in my bioinformatics career, I gave a talk to my department. It was fairly basic stuff – how to identify genes in a genome sequence, standalone BLAST, annotation, data munging with Perl and so on. Come question time, a member of the audience raised her hand and said:
“It strikes me that what you’re doing is rather desperate. Wouldn’t you be better off doing some experiments?”*
It was one of the few times in my life when my jaw literally dropped and swung uselessly on its hinges. Perhaps I should have realised there and then that I was in the wrong department and made a run for it. Instead, I persisted for years, surrounded by people who either couldn’t or wouldn’t “get it”.
Ultimately though, her breathtakingly-stupid question did make a great blog title.
Ha! That's funny...I don't know him at all, and have no idea whether he is actually well-known or well-regarded, given that he's not a social-media-celebrity or whatnot...but I stumbled upon his blog years ago while searching for various scraping techniques, and even as an engineer, reading his blog was a revelation for me that scientifically-minded, rigorously-logical people may yet still have a blind spot towards process.
The OP is railing against dumb programmers...OK, that's fine. But just because I've heard of Josef Mengele doesn't mean that it's a good use of time to continually rant about the dangers of science.
Speaking of bioinformatics, one of my favorite programming blogs is from bioinformatics scientist Neil Saunders, who writes about scripts, complex and short, that he uses to data munge and efficiently run experiments. The title of his blog was inspired by an encounter he had with a fellow scientist who did not see the value of programming:
http://nsaunders.wordpress.com/about-2/about/
> You may be wondering about the title of this blog.
Early in my bioinformatics career, I gave a talk to my department. It was fairly basic stuff – how to identify genes in a genome sequence, standalone BLAST, annotation, data munging with Perl and so on. Come question time, a member of the audience raised her hand and said:
“It strikes me that what you’re doing is rather desperate. Wouldn’t you be better off doing some experiments?”*
It was one of the few times in my life when my jaw literally dropped and swung uselessly on its hinges. Perhaps I should have realised there and then that I was in the wrong department and made a run for it. Instead, I persisted for years, surrounded by people who either couldn’t or wouldn’t “get it”.
Ultimately though, her breathtakingly-stupid question did make a great blog title.