A lot of effort has gone into the documentation of GNU Parallel: Intro videos, a one hour tutorial, tons of examples, a man page on the design decisions behind the code, and even a "Reader's guide" in the man-page.
Can you be a bit more specific why you believe it is a "brick-wall-in-your-face"? Did you follow the "Reader's guide", which is before even the first option is introduced?
I'm sorry if you got the idea that EXAMPLE section is lacking in parallel manpage.
I wasn't checking that, I was ranting on the general state of man pages. I checked ls, curl, wget, mv - none of which had EXAMPLE sections, and that's where I wrote the comment. Didn't even have parallel on my system.
Make was right there under my nose I just never imagined using it for anything but compiling and building things. In that case I was forced by circumstances (was developing on a constrained ancient version of RHEL), couldn't use GNU Parallel and someone suggested `make`. The use case of obvious once a co-worker mentioned it. But it was definitely It was one of the memorable "thinking outside the box" example as they say.
It was addressed elsewhere in the thread. My take is: 1/ it's written in C. 2/ it doesn't suffer from feature creep.
The code is 427 lines of C. GNU parallell is 10k+ lines of perl. Considering mmstick compares the loading times, it's easy to see where the difference comes from.
