Pragmatic - Everyday Scripting With Ruby

Introduction

The shoemaker’s children are running around barefoot. People on the outside of software development projects see them spew out a multitude of tools that shift work from people to computers. But the view inside a project is—all too often—different. There, we see days filled with repetitive manual chores. At one desk, a tester is entering test data into a database by hand. At another, a programmer is sifting through the output from a version control system, trying to find the file she wants. At a third, a business analyst is copying data from a report into a spreadsheet.

Why are these people doing work that computers could do perfectly well? It’s a matter of knowledge and skill. The tester thinks programming is too hard, so he never learned. The programmer knows programming, but none of her languages makes automating this kind of job easy, and she doesn’t have time to do it the hard way. The analyst once wrote a script to do a similar chore, but it broke when she tried to adapt it to this report. Getting it working would take more time than copying the data by hand, even if she has to copy it six times over the next month.