The Pragmatic Programmer: your journey to mastery, 20th Anniversary Edition, 2nd Edition
by David Thomas, Andrew Hunt
Topic 21 | Text Manipulation |
Pragmatic Programmers manipulate text the same way woodworkers shape wood. In previous sections we discussed some specific tools—shells, editors, debuggers—that we use. These are similar to a woodworker's chisels, saws, and planes—tools specialized to do one or two jobs well. However, every now and then we need to perform some transformation not readily handled by the basic tool set. We need a general-purpose text manipulation tool.
Text manipulation languages are to programming what routers[28] are to woodworking. They are noisy, messy, and somewhat brute force. Make mistakes with them, and entire pieces can be ruined. Some people swear they have no place in the toolbox. But in the right hands, both routers and text ...
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