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Re: Re: Why our company doesn't use Perl :(

by Jenda (Abbot)
on Jan 31, 2003 at 00:06 UTC ( #231474=note: print w/ replies, xml ) Need Help??

in reply to Re: Why our company doesn't use Perl :(
in thread Why our company doesn't use Perl :(

You can obfuscate anything. The projects we get to "finish" are always in very bad state. Bad design, unreadable code, terribly inefficient, totaly unreadable ... all in VBScript. I can asure you that I saw things that forced me to scream.

Just a little example. The *&%@#(*$^%*#*&&#^$% was using three variables j, k and l throughout the whole page, then passed them to the next page, and used again j, k and l, but the meanings were exchanged. What used to be k was now l and vice versa. Bleargh. (In the end none of those variables were needed. The design was bad.)

On another page they first wrote the posted data into a file, then made a few useless obfuscations, read the file back in and processed the data. Of course the name of the file was static and there was no locking. But it took a few hours to decipher the code only to find out 90% is worse than useless.

Generaly I think that the quality of the average VBScript code is much worse than the average Perl. Because "just about anyone can write VBScript". So often people not only without education, but also without brains spit out horrible VBScript for living.

But the management is happy ... if the boss looks at the code he doesn't see any strange characters, there are normaly looking english words, it all looks readable ... until you try to read it.


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Re: Re: Re: Why our company doesn't use Perl :(
by Anonymous Monk on Jan 31, 2003 at 01:12 UTC

    I just take one look at this code, throw is away, and rewrite the whole thing. Rarely is it worth all the extra time to decipher it and maintain it in the future.

    Sadly, many managers do not share this opinion.

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