Looking for an exchange on the main site

Question

I am looking for an exchange on the main site from about two years ago.

It was I think a short comment from Terdon.

The question asked for some text processing usage. A number of people (maybe including Terdon) gave short one line answers, some using standard *nix text-processing tools like awk, maybe some less known newer tools also.

One answer gave a longish Python answer -- 30 lines or so.

Terdon asked "Why on earth would you do this when the simple one-liners exist?" (Obviously I dont remember the exact wording he used!)

The answer-er replied: Because I like Python (And by implication dont like other things...)

Context

I am a teacher of programming and started (with learning) Fortran... Pascal in the early 80s. As a teacher I've probably learnt and taught dozens of languages. Started using Python in the early 2000s. At that time I found it neat and sweet. But of late I am finding that while that may be so, the culture around Python is not very conducive for a well-rounded CS education.

I am trying to collect data on this though I guess this question is a bit of "Please help me find a needle in a haystack". So even if finding the exact exchange is very hard I was wondering if people here may be able to come up with nifty SEDE queries that reduce the haystack somewhat!

Answer 1

I made a SEDE query that searches comments posted by a given user ID (you can find a user's user ID by clicking on their profile; for instance, mine is https://unix.stackexchange.com/users/22222/terdon so my UID is 22222) and containing three strings. I then searched with my user ID and the string why, would and python which returned only 4 hits, one of which may well be the one you were thinking of:

I don't understand why you would make something this complex. For recursion, use either bash's (or your shell's equivalent) globstar option and ** globs or find. For a dry run, just use sed. Unless you use the -i option, it won't make any changes. For a backup use sed -i.bak (or perl -i .bak); for files that don't match, use grep PATTERN file || echo file. And why in the world would you have python expand the glob instead of letting the shell do it? Why script.py --glob=foo* instead of just script.py foo*? – terdon ♦ Nov 23, 2017 at 9:34

Answer 2

I don't think it's what you want but, here is the tool I made (the one I mentioned in the comments).

For anyone who didn't look into the comments, this is a tool that converts the stack data dump from archive.org to plaintext (with some minor formatting, details in the readme)

It's horribly written but it works (the main cons besides syntax/language semantic is the time it takes, but it's really fast for unix.SE, so that's fine)

you can then (based on the formatting decision I made) decide to use grep, or any other tools, or strategy and some beverage/snacks of your choice to wait for when it finish. Good luck.