Why is GetPot here ?

Once upon a time, wise men pondered over programming. It arose from their mind, that each program should have a way to be fed with input and a way to get its output out of it. As time passes and much water flows down the river, the way they fed their programs changed. At the beginning, programs were fed with crunchy punch cards. Over time, however, their nutrition became less and less physical. While programs transformed more and more into command recipients, a great invention was made to make them yield to human arbitration: the command line. This gift allowed the people to name their programs and the commands for them in one single line such as:
unix> man -k rhyme reason
seeking traces of rhyme and reason in the system. But the wise men's creativity did not run dry. Soon, programs have grown bigger and bigger and needed more feeding. But the sages did not despair. After periods of drought and patience a fruitful discovery healed many wounds and pains: the text editor. Now, people could prime the food for their programs in sprawled text files. No program's appetite could exhaust their masters. Long winded sonnets could express their desires in any detail:

# data specification for program sense42
world_size = small
 human_size = even-smaller
universum_size = unknown-but-big
 task = 'compute_sense of: human format: lyrics'
time-limit = '10. August 2002'

For the masses the world was in perfect harmony. Behind the curtain, though, were the hordes of suffering fellows: the creators of all those charming programs. They were the ones who struggled to build little interpreters for command lines and input files again and again. But then came GetPot unflinching to alleviate their throe.


Why is GetPot called GetPot ?

Of course, GetPot is not the only hope for the tormented programmers. Ages ago, some brave fellows campaigned against the tortures of command line parsing. For decades their handiwork 'getopt' brought smiles into the faces of the guild. GetPot, though, tries to profit from some new tricks of objected oriented programming to be even more agreable to the maltreated. However, in recognition of getopt, GetPot was named as an anagram.

Reflections of a mild summer night in August 2001, Frank R. Schaefer.