in reply to RFC: Templating without a System

Advice: get a better job.

I'm serious. There is fundamentally wrong with a company that doesn't even talk to an engineeer before selling a contract committing itself to developing a kind of software it has never done before within 5 days. I don't care how simple the project winds up being, sales people should not make that judgement call.

Given the time constraints and your lack of relevant experience, I can understand the choice to roll your own. After all rolling your own is a project of predictable length and complexity. Evaluating mature systems is not. With a 5 day time limit, you can't risk the possibility of deciding on a course after day 1, then finding out on day 3 that the existing tool forces you to do something differently than you were planning on, and you need to redo a day and a half of work.

However the result is that your product will be crappy and inflexible. You'll make a bunch of mistakes that existing templating systems figured out are mistakes. Plus it will be impossible to find anyone else with expertise in what you did.

If this is standard for your employer, then you'll have a lot of poorly designed crap to deal with. After a while everything that you do will be pain and frustration. Better to burn out early, before you're really pissed off, and take a new job than to stick it out in an environment that is guaranteed to make you unhappy.

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Re^2: RFC: Templating without a System
by shmem (Chancellor) on Jun 22, 2006 at 10:11 UTC
    Glad that you raise that issue. But it wasn't as harsh as it may seem. I mentioned the kickoff episode to have an intro, but took those words out of context to get a short intro which would defend somehow my case of instigating a discussion about templating, forseeing that I would be bashed with do your homework or don't reinvent the wheel or choose Foo::Bar, it does the job or such.

    The truth is, those words were uttered likewise, but theres's more about it. As the inhouse SAP administrator at that time I was asked to program the fallback for the applocation our 'Java Witnesses' had been struggling with for more than a year. It was a changing team, mostly students, and they ended up with a myriad of classes they couldn't handle any more. As they went along, I often asked "why don't you do that in perl?", and as the final deadline drew near they gave in and confessed they couldn't, alas, a bit too late.

    I left away the question "Can you do that?" and my answer "I don't know, but I assume yes. I'll try". I did, not in 5 but in 8 days. I omitted this conversation to avoid getting posts saying you fool, you agreed having no clue.

    Yes, the application is crappy, but only in what concerns the SAP part - a plain nightmare, but that's SAP. The web stuff is straight forward, plain CGI as well, with a dispatch table resembling CGI::Application (which I just oversaw at that moment) with heavy use of AutoLoader.

    After all, this situation was non-standard, but a great raise in esteem for perl and your humble poster. The company is more than OK in its standards, generally. Otherwise, I wouldn't be there any more.

    At the end, it showed again that "one perl is often more worth than a sack of java beans", just to quote myself ;-)

    greetings,
    --shmem 

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