Sean, I can only contribute to your request (1) below and echo, from many years of my own experience, Charles' comment about the overriding importance of modularity. If you think about it most issues on maintainability boil down to this. I'd add skilled naming and commenting and claim that if you get only these three you're essentially done--anything else is frosting and not worth fighting about. If you can only get one, choose modularity!
In the other direction, if/when you do that Java conversion I'd love to see a Java <=> Perl comparison of programmer productivity, and runtime performance. Regards, Jim Eshelman ----- Original Message ----- From: "Sean Quinlan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Tuesday, March 12, 2002 11:01 PM Subject: [Boston.pm] maintenance of large perl code bases [forwarded submission from a non-member address -- rjk] From: Sean Quinlan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2002 20:43:52 -0500 Subject: maintenance of large perl code bases To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] I had hoped to bring up this question at tomorrows meeting, but Wednesday's are hard, and tomorrow looks impossible. So maybe someone can toss this up for discussion, and hopefully let the list know the key points. I know there are sights out there, such as Boston.com it appears, and I've heard about some large financial institutions, that rely on substantial amounts of Perl code. Obviously for a successful business, having that code be maintainable is (or should be!) of significant importance. But I regularly hear complaints, largely from non-Perl (or Perl primary anyway) people from other industries coming into bioinformatics, about these large, unmaintainable Perl code bases. Now, in my experience, I have to admit this is largely more true than not. Usually because most of the software was written by people who were biologists/engineers/physicists/whatever first, and programmers (sometimes distant) second, often without thought or concern of it's long term usability. So I've heard of a few places now moving away from Perl, frequently apparently forcing a large ground up recode in some other (usually in Java, and I've heard some interesting 'rumors' as to why) language. I see little point in arguing with this from the standpoint of simply Perl first. I know others better than I have done talks and presentations on writing maintainable Perl code, and probably on the problems with porting old code to a more maintainable format. I want to steal from those people ... blatantly (with credits of course). What I would like to do is to collaborate with a few people who have: 1) Done presentations related to the subject of code maintenance (and a little QA thrown in might be good). 2) Have been involved with or responsible for large installations of Perl code that was well maintained. 3) Others involved with bioinformatics interested in or having experience with this problem. What I would like to and up with are sources for presentations (preferably a couple already canned of varied lengths) on the subject of maintaining large Perl code bases written specifically as it applies to bioinformatics. If you don't want/have time to collaborate, but have pointers to good sources of information/inspiration, please also pipe up. Thanks everyone!!! -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sean P. Quinlan http://people.ne.mediaone.net/squinlan/index.html mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] "You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation" - Plato
