SPUG: software libertarianism (was: Scope question)
Bradley E. Young
byoung at speakeasy.org
Thu Jun 13 17:44:27 CDT 2002
jason,
Changing scope (poor management) killed the project, based on his statements. The language didn't have anything to do with it.
I'll assume that you've been around long enough to know that lots, i.e., 70-80%, of software projects fail and/or go horribly over budget while failing to deliver expected results. This isn't typically due to choice of programming language (hey, wait, maybe if they used Perl, it'd work out better!), but rather management. I worked on a large project written in Java that failed in this manner (creeping featurism, interfaces in flux).
I still haven't seen anything that you can point to that offers even a whit of proof that Perl is less capable than, say, Java for large scale projects.
Brad
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-spug-list at pm.org
> [mailto:owner-spug-list at pm.org]On Behalf Of
> dancerboy
> Sent: Thursday, June 13, 2002 13:06
> To: SPUG
> Subject: RE: SPUG: software libertarianism (was: Scope question)
>
>
> Ummm... I really hate to say this, but I don't see how your use of
> Perl in a large-scale project that *failed* in any way refutes my
> claim that Perl is not an appropriate tool for such applications.
>
> I know this may sound terribly harsh. When you've invested a lot of
> time and effort into a project, it's difficult to admit that some
> fundamental part of it -- such as the choice of language -- was
> flawed from the start. But based on what you've told us here, that
> would be the most obvious conclusion.
>
> Look, we all make mistakes. Some of us learn from them.
>
> -jason
>
>
> At 12:45 pm -0700 2002-06-13, Pommert, Daniel wrote:
> >I must speak up. I have written a fairly large application
> in OO Perl. It
> >was 20,000+ lines, not counting comments, blank lines, POD,
> curly brace
> >lines, etc. Counting those, it was 80,000+. I was one of
> the five main
> >authors. However, I was able to define interfaces that let
> me work without
> >interference with other developers on their portion of the
> project. It was
> >developed on Unix, under X, using Oracle, as a back end
> process. The front
> >end was also written in Perl (up to the HTML and
> JavaScript). I am not
> >counting the lines of code for that. The two sides talked
> through Oracle
> >and MQM (and later Oracle's AQ instead of MQM).
> >
> >I saw no problem extending this program to be much larger
> than it was. Much
> >of it (i.e. the bulk of the lines of code) were quite
> modular and performed
> >a particular polymophic function. About 4,000 lines were
> more difficult to
> >write and involved message passing between multiple
> processes, managing
> >messages, process states, etc.
> >
> >It survived a late stage major structural change (new management, new
> >paradigm). These changes benefited the project by making all of the
> >interfaces more rigorously defined. It was a hassle. But,
> it certainly did
> >not kill things.
> >
> >It worked great until the company paying for the development
> decided that we
> >should scrap it all in favor of a legacy Windows solution.
> (We had failed
> >to achieve one key goal that arose during development.
> Also, the UI people
> >repeated changed the "spec" causing the implementation
> people to always need
> >to change things. The CEO decided that he was throwing good
> money after bad
> >and that was that.)
> >
> >In short, OO Perl can be quite useful for large complicated
> systems. The
> >fact that you don't have to worry about many of the gotchas
> or restrictions
> >of other implementation languages (as much) really helped.
> (e.g. Memory
> >leaks, difficulty in writing virtual constructors, clunky
> string handling,
> >fussing with type conversion routines)
> >
> >(Yes. I have mentioned this project here before. And, yes.
> When I get the
> >time, I intend to rewrite the kernel of it for CPAN.)
> >
> >-- Daniel Pommert
> > Verizon Wireless
> > 425-603-8612
> >
> >
> >-----Original Message-----
> >From: dancerboy [mailto:dancerboy at strangelight.com]
> >Sent: Thursday, June 13, 2002 11:15 AM
> >To: SPUG
> >Subject: Re: SPUG: software libertarianism (was: Scope question)
> >
> >
> >At 9:38 am -0700 2002-06-13, Dan Ebert wrote:
> >>On Wed, 2002-06-12 at 23:35, dancerboy wrote:
> >>> Java and C# are meant for large-scale applications, not
> one-liners.
> >>
> >>I hope you are not implying perl cannot be used to write large
> >>applications. I have seen perl used effectively for some
> decent size
> >>(and fairly complex) programs.
> >
> >I would say that there's significant overlap in what different
> >languages are good for. Java is crappy for one-liners, but great for
> >medium- to large-scale applications. Perl is great for one-liners,
> >crappy for truly *large*-scale applications. For medium-sized
> >^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> >applications, Perl can be great OR crappy, depending on the skills of
> >the developer(s) involved. To paraphrase something I say on my web
> >page: Perl empowers programmers to write code in any way that they
> >want. In many cases, however, that means empowering programmers to
> >write code very, very badly.
> >
> >-jason
> >
> >
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