Almost by definition, the people who teach science are the people who (didn't want to go it|couldn't cut it) in research, thus making them ill equipped to teach the important things about research. Many of the good researchers I have talked to resented having to give lectures because lectures take away from research time (you may only see one hour of class, but it takes three or four hours to prepare, not counting marking homework). Feyman was a good researcher who was different enough to enjoy teaching too.

Of course I should shut up now, since I'm not yet doing research, but I've researched doing research, if that makes sense. I have however noticed that the quality of a teacher can be enough to drive an entire class of people away from a subject, or to pack a lecture hall for a subject - even among third-year students.

If it's ten lines that you want to re-use, but the second use is different enough that it doesn't make sense to build a common subroutine, go ahead.

I can't think of a situation where this would happen. I suspect you mean that the in the second use the code is likely to diverge from the first over time, so factoring the ten lines in a subroutine would end up with lots of conditionals in the routing to deal with changing circumstances. In that case, definately don't factor.

It has been pointed out that typeing use CGI is as much cargo cult as rolling your own, but that's not quite true. Using a module is like buying a manufactured product, like a plane. Rolling a quickie is like trying to make one from scratch is inherently dodgy, like trying to make a plane of of bamboo and get it flying. It worked for Daedelus, kinda, but it's not a good way to do it for production code.

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Jeremy
I didn't believe in evil until I dated it.