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<h1>Perl Power Tools v0.14: Why?</h1>
<p>
Here's why we're doing it:
</p>
<ol>
<li><strong>Laziness</strong>:
I'm tired of wasting my life trying to cobble together make-shift
work-arounds to do the job of fundamental tools that are broken or
absent on systems various and sundry. And if it's hard on me,
imagine the poor guys on systems I must charitably refer to as
tool-challenged, those lacking even these most fundamental of
programmer tools.
</li>
<li><strong>Impatience</strong>:
I get more than a bit impatient when someone has some simple problem
that can be trivially done using one or three basic commands, but
when I tell them how to do it, they whinge about not being on a
proper Unix system and how they therefore can't do the obvious
thing.
</li>
<li><strong>Hubris</strong>:
It's listed last, but this is the most important reason -- simply
being able to say that <em>we did it</em>. Why do we climb mountains?
Why do we learn to ski? Because it's there, and because it's fun!
</li>
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<p>
Not only can most basic commands be implemented using just a wee bit
of Perl code, once these have been done, they're automatically much
more powerful and more robust than the old versions. No more
line-too-long errors. No more fixed-buffer problems. Any pattern
matching is automatically turbo-charged. While we don't expect anyone
to replace a functioning <tt>/bin</tt> (if they have one), these
should make good example Perl programs.
</p>
<p>
Here's my <a href="p5p-note.html">original notice</a> to the Perl
development team announcing the project.
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