Techies are great at being techie, but newbees know what they stumbled over. A Howto written by a newbee is of far greater value to other newbees because their thinking is usually decidedly non-technical. It stands to reason therefore that a non-technical newbee who has accomplished some task can explain what they did in a way that is understandable to other newbees.
Vocabulary is one of the highest hurdles that a newcomer must clear. Let the newbees write so other newbees can understand.
At the corporation where I work, we frequently choose script over compiled code for a myriad of applications. Since we have 24x7 systems to maintain, rapid error recovery is vital. If I get a call at 2:00AM and drive in to the office, when I identify the offending program, I want to be able to fix it on the spot without having to dig up a particular development environment. With script, Vi or notepad is all I need to solve the problem and get back to sleep.
The complaint with script of course is speed. In comparison to compiled code, it dogs. In our environment we do worry about performance tuning, and look for obvious inefficiencies like everyone else. But the simple reality is: "Too slow? Buy a bigger box". In the grand scheme, hardware is cheap, people are expensive. Therefore, we script. It gets the job done and frees us up to get to other projects.
Slashdot Mirror
Techies are great at being techie, but newbees know what they stumbled over. A Howto written by a newbee is of far greater value to other newbees because their thinking is usually decidedly non-technical. It stands to reason therefore that a non-technical newbee who has accomplished some task can explain what they did in a way that is understandable to other newbees.
Vocabulary is one of the highest hurdles that a newcomer must clear. Let the newbees write so other newbees can understand.
I'm also dying for a Garmin Moving map GPS
At the corporation where I work, we frequently choose script over compiled code for a myriad of applications. Since we have 24x7 systems to maintain, rapid error recovery is vital. If I get a call at 2:00AM and drive in to the office, when I identify the offending program, I want to be able to fix it on the spot without having to dig up a particular development environment. With script, Vi or notepad is all I need to solve the problem and get back to sleep.
The complaint with script of course is speed. In comparison to compiled code, it dogs. In our environment we do worry about performance tuning, and look for obvious inefficiencies like everyone else. But the simple reality is: "Too slow? Buy a bigger box". In the grand scheme, hardware is cheap, people are expensive. Therefore, we script. It gets the job done and frees us up to get to other projects.