Fair enough. Yes, it's true you want to be solid, but I also feel it's vital to do more. Here's why.

If you're successful in the long term, sooner or later you're gonna need to upgrade ... and developing a strong upgrade capability early forces you to implement high automated test coverage early ... which confers many benefits, listed at Effective Automated Testing.

With high automated test coverage in place, you can confidently test your software with many different versions of Perl and libraries ... which may flush out further bugs (e.g. a test may pass with one version of Perl/library but fail with a different version). In summary then, developing a strong upgrade/autotest capability early improves code quality.

It also gives a psychological boost - you no longer fear/dread having to upgrade or port to a new platform, you welcome it! You can easily run experiments with different versions of Perl and libraries to verify that everything still works and to see if they run faster or slower and by how much.

Finally, being able to gracefully move to the latest and greatest may help with recruiting top notch developers (especially younger ones). Admittedly most of my experience here is with C++ programmers but, especially the younger ones, are usually energized by using the latest and greatest features.

Regarding teamwork, you are right, I was out of line, I was imagining the arguments between Leitz and some of the younger guys at work who love using the latest and greatest. :) I've experienced many heated arguments in teams over the years, as indicated at Conflict in Teams, so have learnt the hard way that it is vitally important to clear the air and get everyone pulling in the same direction.

In reply to Re^3: Rediscovering Hubris by eyepopslikeamosquito
in thread Rediscovering Hubris by Leitz

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