At my company, we have knowledge engineers and software engineers. The knowledge engineer do their job in Perl or Lisp and produce code that gets ported to C/C++ by the software engineers.

There are several reasons for this setup, but the upshot is that the knowledge engineers can do their work quickly and efficiently, while the software engineers take care of speed issues, stability and maintenance, each concentrating on what he's best at.

However, the price to pay for me is that I have to refrain from using Perl to the extreme, in the sense that I can't use idioms that are too hard to translate to other programming languages, e.g. C/C++

This might be the point to draw the line for those who ever want to get their code ported (as well as those who'll have their code ported, willingly or otherwise).

map is easy to translate, grep a little harder, but a file slurp?

Just my US$0.02...

        -gjb-

In reply to Re: Idioms considered harmful by gjb
in thread Idioms considered harmful by rinceWind

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