At 01:48 PM 3/13/02 -0500, James Eshelman wrote: >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!
Thanks! I appriciate all the input I can get [And thanks Steve for trying to keep the thread on topic]. As I mentioned before, I'd already started leaning in this direction. And writing Perl modules can lead not only to modularity, but comes with tools for testing and distributing. > >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. I'm sorry if I gave the wrong impression. Although I have my share of bad code (or, more often, just uncommented and unclear) to work with, fortunately there's very litle I need to maintain or update. I was refering to others I have met that have done, or are contemplating, this. Personally, I love Perl, and for as long Perl is a competitive language choice for the types of work I do, I'll leave proting Perl code to other languages. I just don't want to see the language blamed for things that simply not it's fault, but a fault of it's implimentation, as has been pointed out here many times. As for the comparison, it's been done before. I even seem to recall one a few years ago including c as well. Unfortunately I don't have any links to provide you. > >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 > > > > > ----------------------------------------------------------------- Sean Quinlan [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bmerc-www.bu.edu 617.353.7123
