On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 11:00 PM, Ross McKay rosko@zeta.org.au wrote:
Lex Trotman wrote:
Why do people still do data wrangling in text this many years after the invention of the day-tar base. (rhetorical question ;-)
He said it's rhetorical, yet you answer anyway. Which is just fine by me, because I was going to answer too, regardless if anyone else did!
My situation is very similar: Lots of data from disparate sources, data is going to have to pass through some lingua franca anyway, and more often than not, that's going to be some kind of plain text.
Compounding the issue for me is that I'm a Windows Weenie, so I don't have the fancy *nix command-line tools, though I do use Python quite a lot.
So editor/IDE support for day-tar wrangling is definitely a useful feature. In my opinion, a full-blown database is actually a more heavyweight and overengineered solution than a well-executed editor plug-in for plenty of use cases.
John