I have a short and hopefully thought-provoking (if not too overdone) Perl-related story to tell.

This summer I went to the HOPE conference in New York with some friends. One of these friends, Jason, gave a talk there. The night before the talk, we were loitering in a Starbucks. He was desperately preparing for his presentation, mostly by writing slides. Jason mentioned that he needed a quick script to generate MD5 hashes to use as part of a demonstration. Very shortly I wrote him something that ended up as this: 

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use Digest::MD5 qw(md5_hex);

unless (@ARGV) {
  print "perl $0 hashme hashmetoo\n";
  exit;
}

print $_, " = ", md5_hex($_), "\n" for @ARGV;
print "\n";
print md5_hex($_), "\n" for @ARGV;

[download]
The second round of hash output was so he could conveniently paste into another application.

This is a simple task that was solved very easily, provided the right tools. Anyone with a slight knowledge of Perl and some concept of how to find and use relevant modules could accomplish this very quickly, as I did. Jason used the tool early in his talk, and then moved onto a direct lecture on technical details of his project. After his presentation he was approached by an employee of a certain well-known company that bills itself as the global leader in information security and availability. Among other items brought up, the drone asked for Jason to email him the program used to generate the hashes.

Do you, the Perl Monks community, agree that that is an unnecessary and humbling request? I would think that anyone who needs to ask an independent professional for such a petty tool would be an embarrassment to his company. He has certainly provided enough fodder for my jokes. There really is a lot to consider about the circumstance. Did the large company make a mistake in hiring him, or is he an average bear there? How exactly can he be expected to perform his duties as a security consultant (a title he signs his emails with)? Perhaps he is fluent in some programming languages, such as C (oh, the repetitive example!), and would consider the task of generating his own tool in that too difficult. If so, what does that say about the competitive advantage garnered by using a flexible language with a unified management and code repository?

In reply to The Importance of Being Earnest by zshzn

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.