{"id":23850,"date":"2014-01-20T09:47:19","date_gmt":"2014-01-20T14:47:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=23850"},"modified":"2014-01-20T10:09:26","modified_gmt":"2014-01-20T15:09:26","slug":"xkcd-on-the-problem-with-attempting-to-automate-tasks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/01\/20\/xkcd-on-the-problem-with-attempting-to-automate-tasks\/","title":{"rendered":"XKCD on the problem with attempting to automate tasks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p align=\"center\"><a href=\"http:\/\/xkcd.com\/1319\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/xkcd_automation.png\" title=\"&#39;Automating&#39; comes from the roots &#39;auto-&#39; meaning &#39;self-&#39;, and &#39;mating&#39;, meaning &#39;screwing&#39;.\" alt=\"xkcd_automation\" width=\"404\" height=\"408\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-23851\" srcset=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/xkcd_automation.png 404w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/xkcd_automation-148x150.png 148w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 404px) 100vw, 404px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not a programmer, although I&#8217;ve spent much of my working life around programmers, which is why I recognize the pattern so well: I&#8217;ve seen it in action so often. <\/p>\n<p>The few times I&#8217;ve needed to create a program to do something (usually a text transformation of one sort or another), this has been <em>exactly<\/em> the way the &#8220;labour-saving&#8221; automation has gone. My personal version of the chart would have an additional phase at the beginning: I have to begin by learning or re-learning the tool I need to use. I learn just enough of how to use a given tool to do the task at hand, then the knowledge atrophies from lack of use and the next time I need to do something similar, the first priority is figuring out the right tool and then learning the same basic tasks all over again. <\/p>\n<p>I started out with <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Rexx\" target=\"_blank\">REXX<\/a> when I was a co-op student at IBM. Several years later, I needed to convert a large set of documents from one markup language to another on a Unix system and that meant learning (just enough) <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Shell_script\" target=\"_blank\">shell scripting<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Sed\" target=\"_blank\">sed<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/AWK\" target=\"_blank\">awk<\/a>. A few years after that the right tool seemed to be <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Perl\" target=\"_blank\">Perl<\/a>. In every case, the knowledge doesn&#8217;t stick with me because I don&#8217;t need to do anything with the language after I&#8217;ve finished the immediate task. I remember <em>being able to do it<\/em> but I don&#8217;t recall <em>exactly how to do it<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m not a programmer, although I&#8217;ve spent much of my working life around programmers, which is why I recognize the pattern so well: I&#8217;ve seen it in action so often. The few times I&#8217;ve needed to create a program to do something (usually a text transformation of one sort or another), this has been exactly [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,15],"tags":[109,129],"class_list":["post-23850","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humour","category-technology","tag-computers","tag-hack"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-6cG","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23850","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23850"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23850\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23854,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23850\/revisions\/23854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}