The language barrier
Mar. 16th, 2006 05:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sawylEvery few months, usually during our monthly discussions of my work, the HC and I get into a wrangle over programming languages. He usually gets upset whenever I do anything in python, on the grounds that no one else in the group knows python and that it'll be impossible to support if something goes wrong with it. He usually tries to insist that everything should be written in Perl or, God help us, Korn shell for maximum maintainability.
I mean, Korn Shell. I know Korn shell. Korn shell is one of my languages. I've walked its dusty corridors; coaxed it into extreme contortions; whispered sweet nothings in its ear; taken it out to dinner on Valentines Day and sent it flowers on our anniversary, but that doesn't stop me from recognising it for what it is: an appalling, inconsistent, inelegant, flaky, proprietary mess that no-one in their right mind should think of using for a script longer than 10 lines.
Besides, I've seen some of our in house Korn shell and perl scripts and they generally look like they've been gzipped. There's no way I could even begin to support them; not with out spending two weeks picking them apart, a week bug fixing and three weeks in rehab afterwards. My attitude is that it's not the language that matters, it's the code: I suspect that even without a working knowledge of python, my colleagues would be able to fix one of my programmes, whereas I'm not sure they'd be able to say the same about some of the heavily optimised ksh code that we've cranked out over the years...
I mean, Korn Shell. I know Korn shell. Korn shell is one of my languages. I've walked its dusty corridors; coaxed it into extreme contortions; whispered sweet nothings in its ear; taken it out to dinner on Valentines Day and sent it flowers on our anniversary, but that doesn't stop me from recognising it for what it is: an appalling, inconsistent, inelegant, flaky, proprietary mess that no-one in their right mind should think of using for a script longer than 10 lines.
Besides, I've seen some of our in house Korn shell and perl scripts and they generally look like they've been gzipped. There's no way I could even begin to support them; not with out spending two weeks picking them apart, a week bug fixing and three weeks in rehab afterwards. My attitude is that it's not the language that matters, it's the code: I suspect that even without a working knowledge of python, my colleagues would be able to fix one of my programmes, whereas I'm not sure they'd be able to say the same about some of the heavily optimised ksh code that we've cranked out over the years...
