in reply to Re^4: Perl in the Enterprise
in thread Perl in the Enterprise

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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Re^6: Perl in the Enterprise
by perrin (Chancellor) on May 18, 2006 at 21:28 UTC
    "Enterprise" systems usually refer to the in-house custom apps that businesses write for their own use and don't sell to anyone, e.g. "that thing Bob wrote that lets the merchants check how many foozits were purchased but not shipped yet". As anyone who has worked on such systems knows, these are almost uniformly the worst code imaginable. Most of them don't scale, have no tests, and are held together with chewing gum. It is possible that things are just as bad in the non-weaponry side of military coding, but I hope not.
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      Then you really are unfamiliar with governments, bureaucracies, and militaries. :-)

      We're building the house of the future together.
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        No kidding.

        When I was in the Army, I came into possession of a framed sheet of paper with three quotes on it. Each quote was basically a reformulation of the same basic concept. They went a little something like this (paraphrased):

        • "The American military excels at war because war is chaos, and the American military practices chaos on a daily basis." (attributed to a World War Two Nazi officer)
        • "It is extremely difficult to collect intelligence on the American military because their manuals, their orders, their battle plans, and their behavior never agree with one another." (attributed to a Cold War era Russian officer)
        • "How can the enemy predict our strategy when we don't even know what we're doing?" (attributed to an anonymous US Army enlisted man)

        Unfortunately, I don't recall anything like the exact phrasing (though I think the Nazi and Army quotes are pretty close, at least), or the names of the Nazi or Russian officers, but I think the point is gotten across. For the record, I pretty much agree with the common sentiment, based on my own experiences with US military "organization".

        I wonder if I still have that thing somewhere. . . .

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

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      By the same logic, I used to think that the systems that run transactions at banks must hold up to the highest standards, and that this is why banking IT is so conservative. Note I am using the past tense…

      Makeshifts last the longest.

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