Re^3: The Limitations of the CPAN

Perl has everything it takes to be enterprise class, however, more coders code that path of least resistance rather than with the big picture in mind.

At my last place of employment, a Java developer wrote some code to pull data from the database. That code, because the structure was copied everywhere, ended up in every single place data was pulled from the database. Because of this code, this company ended up spending $400,000 on a new server with no discernible improvement.

What was this code, you may ask? It was the path of least resistance. Something along the lines of:

Get a list of IDs from the database
Iterate through that list, creating an object for each ID
Each object, potentially, will populate objects it has, using the same method

So, what would have been a cinch to code up using a very minimal knowledge of SQL ended up costing at least a million dollars in unnecessary upgrades and lost productivity. All because a programmer didn't bother learning how to use the tools he was using.

I've seen this "bug" in at least three languages, two of which are considered enterprise-class (Java and C/C++). I've also seen it in Perl. The path of least resistance is a human bug, not a software one.

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