Dave made many of the same arguments back then that he just posted. One that I remember was that under some conditions it's good enough to write a shell script even though a full implementation in a standard programming language might be called for, on the grounds that it's something that can be quickly implemented. Dan's response, after a few exchanges between Dave and myself, was that he was in total agreement with Dave, and the basis for his opinion was that programming was a hobby for him, not just a career.
Well ... I have never really considered myself to be a hacker. I think I have tried, over the years, to strike some kind of a balance between doing "the right thing" and doing something that users, customers, or a proxy for same (ie. management) thought was necessary. I have certainly seen the dark side of "good enough" software – it may have been good enough to work for six weeks of transition while bringing someone up to speed to take over my reporting responsibilities so I could join the index build team, but it wasn't good enough (and was never intended to be) to be a replacement for Yahoo's log processing, and would have had to be in order for me to remain employed there ... So while I certainly respect Dave and Dan's arguments, I have to admit a certain frustration, perhaps because I've been burned ...
BTW, one of the "heritage" radio stations in the SF bay area, KFRC, changed to a new format, which features (among other things) pop songs from the mid-to-late 1980s. There was a station on the air back then called KYUU that played many of the songs KFRC plays now. KYUU's frequency was 99.7, which is KFRC's now as well. I mention this because I was a regular KYUU listener around the time Dave, Dan, and I had this debate.
(Why do I remember this, but don't remember what the DNS options are for tcpdump?)
