In a message dated: Wed, 21 Jun 2000 19:58:39 EDT
Benjamin Scott said:
>On Wed, 21 Jun 2000, Paul Lussier wrote:
>>> (1) Programmer Brain Damage ...
>>
>> This is not a *language* problem, but human one. If the program is
>> written properly, it will run anywhere!
>
> Okay, Paul. Write me a Perl program that will batch add new user accounts,
>including setting the password, that will run anywhere. :-)
Are you saying it can't be done? If so, then either you aren't a very good
programmer, you're pretty naiive, or just don't want to spend the time to do
so yourself (I fit in the last category, I'm quite lazy :).
Perl programs have been written to this in the Unix world, and perl programs
can be done to do this for the NT world. There's no reason you can't take the
2 and create one program that decides what to do based on the architecture
it's running on. Added functionality could be written in on an as needed
basis to support whatever architecture is required and has a perl interpreter
(Doesn't this sound just a *bit* like Java?)
Is it reasonable to do this? Probably not. Let's be reasonable here, this
whole debate started with the merits of perl vs. bash, sh, and csh. I merely
made a claim that Perl was more portable than any of those. Never did I make
the claim that it was necessary or worthwhile to write perl such that it took
advantage of that capability.
I live in a Unix world, and the perl I write I expect to be run on a Unix
machine. I never expect it to be run on NT, therefore I make no accomodations
for it to be run there. Should the need ever arise and my stuff is needed on
an NT system, then yes, it would need to be "ported" to NT in order to
accomodate that OS's specific nature. Is that a failing on my part? I
suppose, or you could call it a calculated risk that my stuff will never need
to be run on NT. But, my point still stands, at least my script *can* run on
NT, you can not say the same for bourne, korn, or c shell. (Okay, sure, the
MKS toolkit has ksh for NT, but it's not 100% compatible with the real ksh, or
even pdksh for that matter. Stephen Korn is claimed to made that statement in
public to an MS Sales/Mktg weenie by maddog).
> It ain't that hard to be portable to only one platform, Paul. :-)
>
> No program exists in a vacuum. It's nice to blame portability on the
>environment, but if your program doesn't interact with the environment in any
>way at all, why are you running it? :-)
Are trying to make a point here? If so, then maybe the caffeine hasn't kicked
in yet this morning, because I totally fail to understand the point of those
last 3 statements.
--
Seeya,
Paul
----
"I always explain our company via interpretive dance.
I meet lots of interesting people that way."
Niall Kavanagh, 10 April, 2000
If you're not having fun, you're not doing it right!
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