Peter Crowther wrote:
From: Caldarale, Charles R [mailto:chuck.caldar...@unisys.com]
Hear, hear! In a past life, a guy I know actually wrote a
suite of production programs in APL - which was even more
cryptic (but also more logical) than Perl.
Dedication indeed! Did he need the custom golfball for the teletype with the
special symbols, or was the interface a little more modern than that?
I have to admit that we have several production applications written
almost entirely in Perl. They chug along since several years,
processing several thousand documents a day, from MS-Word through PDFs
to CAD/CAM drawings and emails, digesting them and making them
searchable for grateful users. Their merit is all the greater since
they work in the obscure non-graphical background, they never get any of
the attention, and they have to share machines with some Java programs,
which means they get only the usage of a tiny fraction of the RAM and
CPU cycles, although they do most of the real work and have to do it
with a single thread each.
But such is the the deplorable state of our educational systems nowadays
that one can no longer find real sharp logical young minds capable of
designing efficient and reliable systems from scratch. So one has to
depend instead on rigid frameworks and on programming languages like
Java, which severely constrain the programmer's imagination, but make it
less likely that one would land in trouble.
Even some of the old-school programmers, mostly in their later years,
succumb to the what-the-heck syndrome and come to appreciate the sense
of security and comfort provided by strongly-typed and rigidly
object-oriented languages, with which one can just dedicate one thread
to collect the memory garbage left over by sloppy programs, another to
collect loose database connections, another to kill off poor abandoned
objects, another to optimise badly-written lines of code etc.
One has to wonder however if some day, the same kind of meltdown as we
are currently seeing in the bloated world of finance, will not strike
these over-engineered monsters, and if there will not be massive thread
and memory layoffs.
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