Yesterday I finally sat down and created the cherry cordial program that I wrote about here. It will run twice a week and email me if any Little Debbie cherry cordials are in stock nearby. The code itself is rather boring to look at; most of it involves error checking. If anything goes wrong at any point, it has to alert me, otherwise it could break and I would never know. To run the program, I type something like this:
./snackfinder --product='Cherry Cordials' --zip=12345 --radius=10
As of today, there are no cherry cordials near me. I expect that to be the case for the next 8-9 months.
Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was also a programmer. In the book Last Chance to See he says:
I am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand.
Ha! That's pretty much how I feel about my snack finder. It was 3-4 hours of work, and it's saving me only a few seconds of effort, but I am extremely pleased with it, nonetheless!