# Not only for technical computing: changing the narrative around the usecase for Julia

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/not-only-for-technical-computing-changing-the-narrative-around-the-usecase-for-julia/19784>\
**Category:** Community\
**Created:** [January 18, 2019, 1:58pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/not-only-for-technical-computing-changing-the-narrative-around-the-usecase-for-julia/19784 "2019-01-18T13:58:30Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 52

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**Author:** ![tkf](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/tkf/32/17635_2.png) [@tkf](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/tkf)\
**Post date:** [January 21, 2019, 12:08am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/not-only-for-technical-computing-changing-the-narrative-around-the-usecase-for-julia/19784/52 "2019-01-21T00:08:02Z")

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> [@ninjaaron](#):
>
> What’s the actual usecase for writing to stdin and reading from the stdout of the same command or pipeline inside of a Julia script?

My [InteractiveCodeSearch.jl](https://github.com/tkf/InteractiveCodeSearch.jl) is one of the examples that needs that. Another example I’ve seen in the wild is the [SVG renderer for VegaLite.jl](https://github.com/fredo-dedup/VegaLite.jl/blob/60aa6b46da62968055c817277f762e8eee0bbcb8/src/rendering/show.jl#L10-L25).

> [@ninjaaron](#):
>
> Using a process as a filter inside of a Julia/Python/Ruby/Perl script is fairly rare and sort of inelegant, since these languages are perfectly capable of doing their own text filtering.

I agree this for `grep` and `sed` but there are non-trivial APIs provided as CLIs like I just mentioned. Piping is a good “RPC” for simple things. It’s nice to be good at it.

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