in reply to Re: Perl in the Enterprise
in thread Perl in the Enterprise

I don't know what these "control systems" you're talking about are, but they clearly have nothing to do with "enterprise" and "mission critical" software. You seem to be talking about something military, or some kind of real-time system, i.e. something that would be written in Ada or similar. Enterpise and mission critical software only has to be good enough to run some backend stuff at a stock trading company. No one dies if it goes down, and correctness at the expense of productivity is totally unacceptable. If the cost of mistakes is lower than the cost of avoiding the mistakes, businesses will take the mistakes every time, and that's what enterprise software is all about.

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Re^3: Perl in the Enterprise
by Fletch (Bishop) on May 18, 2006 at 13:49 UTC

    ObAnecdote: Prof for a software engineering class I took used to work on military grade systems. She told us of one demo they gave of some equipment (some sort of avionics system, I want to say) that was supposed to be very fault tolerant (redundant components, etc). Before they started, one of the observing colonels or generals said "Hold on a second" and went up to the demo unit, popped it open, and plucked out a CPU. Fortunately for them, it worked as designed.

    Needless to say, that's definitely a few steps beyond even "enterprise".

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      We called the creation of that level of robust system stability "Joe-proofing", because it was ensuring that the system could survive being subjected to the tender ministrations of GI Joe in the field.

      print substr("Just another Perl hacker", 0, -2);
      		 - apotheon
      CopyWrite Chad Perrin

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Re^3: Perl in the Enterprise
by Anonymous Monk on May 18, 2006 at 16:40 UTC
    The article is talking about replacing Ada with Perl for submarine navigation controls; that's an example of a control system, and it's insane.

    Read the article; the author thinks perl is perfect for literally everything. It's not.

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      You're right, that is an idiotic idea. I don't know why he thinks that has anything to do with "enterprise." Military applications are almost the opposite of enterprise coding.
[reply]
        Military applications are almost the opposite of enterprise coding.

        I'm guessing to you "military" means something like aviation control or weapons targeting systems.

        But "the military" is an enterprise in itself. The U.S. DoD is the largest, most complex organization in the world. They do indeed have "enterprise" systems, for things like logistics management.

        We're building the house of the future together.
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