(I was not planning to write any more on this thread.  This will be my
last message on the subject.)

Dave Roth <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> Patrick,
> I don't see how Moore's law is applicable in this situation. It doesn't
> matter how fast your computer is if it is trying to process 1000's of
> requests per second.

We were talking about "Disabling a service".

> Moore's law says that the speed of processing doubles every 18 months or so.
> But the problem is that our expectations also double. So if you are running
> a script that takes 1 second to process today, you would expect it to only
> take 500 ms in 18 months. However if you use WMI it may take 2 seconds today
> and 1 second later. Regardless it is still more time than need be.

Your experience may differ, but I spend much more of my time reading
and debugging scripts than I do waiting for them to run.  (And I spend
even more time working around bugs in software for which I lack the
source.  But that is another topic.)

The point of my Moore's law reference was that, in the long run, human
time dominates software cost.  Would I trade one script which takes 1
second and is barely maintainable for another which takes 2 seconds
and is easy to read?  YES, because soon those times will be
imperceptibly close, but the script will still need maintenance.

> However I don't want to limit my coding to interfaces that I believe
> will be around in 5 years so that newbies then would be able to
> understand my programming. That, in my mind, is unreasonable.

Then I respectfully disagree with you.

And it is not about being a "newbie", it is about lacking the time to
delve into the nuances of every random third-party Perl module.

> Just a couple of years ago WMI was not around so coders coded
> directly into the Win32 APIs. In another couple of years WMI will
> probably be replaced with something else. This is inevitible.

Given that WMI is Microsoft's implementation of the WBEM standard
(http://dmtf.org/standards/standard_wbem.php), which they are trying
to push on other vendors, I doubt it.

> If you have hired a programmer that can not do enough research to
> figure out what Win32 API calls are doing then you should fire him
> right away.

But we are not talking about Win32 API calls.  We are not talking
about writing this stuff in C (although that would be the logical
consequence of your argument).  We are talking about Win32::Lanman.

> I can certainly appreciate you not wanting to use 3rd party
> modules/extensions, but keep in mind this is one of the reasons
> people use Perl in the first place.

I did not say "never use 3rd party modules".  Sometimes they are the
right choice, especially when they let you write simpler code
(Net::DNS is perhaps my favorite).  But using a 3rd party module which
provides a *more complex* interface is a bad idea.  If you really care
that much about "performance", then you should not be using Perl in
the first place.

 - Pat
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