So you’re really good at the command line 🖥️

That was the compliment I got today at work.

It seems odd because I was thirty years ago the Macintosh kid, I couldn’t imagine doing anything from the command line. It seemed so backwards, so difficult having to memorize all those commands. But then some 30 years ago, I installed Linux on my Power Macintosh after Apple announced that they would not support it with Mac OS X.

I won’t say the day after installing Linux I became a command line guru. Indeed even to this day, I generally use GUI software but nothing beats a simple bash script or a pipeline for automating processes. Repetitive clicking is annoying and if I have to remember to do something I’m bound to forget about it. If it’s in a script and the process is automated I’m much less likely to make mistakes.

I’m by no means a computer guru or expert. But I know enough to do some pretty neat things – especially now with the R Statistical Language and duckdb. I’m no expert but I can still do great things with a few lines of code. I’ll be the first to admit that there is a lot I’m unfair with especially compared to the professional programmers I work with in the office. But certain things I’m really good at doing.

I’ve learned a lot of different programming languages over the years but R is my favorite and the one I best at. I just like it being an interpretive language, one you can execute one line at a time, build maggitr pipeline of commands, chaining whole lines of commands together. I like being able to preview outputs and explore while writing a bigger program. It’s really good for quick little data processing scripts. Duckdb and Parquets are wonderful for analyzing and pulling records and processing even larger datasets quickly. And there is a lot of value in data.

I still like GUI programs but for automation few things beat the command line. I might not be a real programmer but I can do some pretty neat things with R Studio.