On simplicity, awk and potatoes

Yes, things certainly changes all the time for us IT folks. New classes of hardware, new cool pieces of software and cool gadgets. Stuff that usually gets better and better, and if not, at least they are on the move. Constantly.

2012 years new potatoes. (c) God

If it isn't Ivy Bridge based motherboards, it's "New iPad" (that is a strange name by the way, what is wrong with iPad 3? And it will not be "new" for long) or MySQL 5.6 or Ubuntu 11.10.

And then there are things that don't improve much over time, and still stays around. Sometimes because they have some powerful backers, despite it being pure evil (Adobe Flash anyone), but sometimes because it's so good that you just cannot improve on the original. Awk truly was right from the start, few improvements has been done since I first used it some 30 years ago, and it's still the same helpful tool (sure, some things have changed, but the basic concept is the same, and most of the common syntax also).


And then we have stuff that, unlike awk, isn't developing at all. No new releases, no features added, no cool beta versions, just the same plain old thing, year after year, and that's how we like it to be. For example (you MySQLers reading this already know what this is about) swedish new potatoes. I had my first for this year today. Oh my god, this is so good! With a pinch of salt and some butter, this is better than candy!

/Karlsson