Do admins and savvy programmers not remember how to use the shell?

I stumbled upon this blog page when googling info on how to use meld as a git diff tool.


In short he says you do this if you want to use meld as your diff tool for git:

My response: are you kidding me? Did you never think, "Hmm, I wonder if the shell I use every day for executing commands would be good for..." wait for it, "Executing a command!".


Maybe this is better instead of writing a whole python script to swap command line arguments around:

If you are using git I'm assuming you are a developer or an administrator on some level. And, if you are using meld I'm also going to assume that using a variant of UNIX; which means, that the first and most powerful tool you have at your disposal is your shell. So really guys, stop thinking that you absolutely must use an interpreted scripting language for everything and just start thinking. Because honestly if I put this on a qualification test to see if I would hire you and you used a python script to modify the argument order of a system call: I wouldn't hire you.