Is Zach Holman trolling us?
spark is over 400 points on HN right now.
Initially, the script didn’t work on OS X. Now I’m not sure what it does work on, but it barely works on my OS X terminal, and it definitely doesn’t work in Cygwin.
It takes a comma-separated list, instead of a standard argument list. So you have to use tr "\n" "," instead of just simple substitution or xargs.
It doesn’t even handle the examples in the README. The earthquake data is made up of floating point numbers, and so you not only lose a good deal of information, but the latest script flat-out chokes on it.
And then there’s the speed. Somehow it’s taking over 2 minutes to run the (incorrect) earthquake sparkline.
Now compare that to a 4-line Ruby version that works correctly, handles positive and negative decimal numbers, works the same anywhere that Ruby runs, and runs hundreds of times faster (and this is Ruby here), and holman tells me “Ruby is for chumps”?
Is he trolling?
