absolute paths: absolute bad idea

I wish I knew why people persist in hard-coding paths to executables in /bin and /usr/bin. This is just asking for trouble; the program moves from one place to another, or you get the path wrong somewhere and it breaks. It also prevents me from putting my own version of an executable in /usr/local/bin, or moving a binrary from /usr/bin to /bin because my system needs it on boot. So hardcoded paths are both fragile and rigid.

Oddly enough, UNIX was designed with a fix for this problem, known as the PATH variable, but few people seem to use it. Strangest of all is that I know that otherwise reasonable people will disagree with me, and continue using their hardcoded absolute paths.

This is one thing that python gets right.