[cumbria_lug] Perl or Python: a challenge

[Trevor Pearson]

Angie Ahl wrote:
>> I've just had a quick run through the code, and oh dear me !
>>
>> So I have no choice, it's perl, for this job. It must be nice when 
>> you can decide which language your going to use, sigh.
>>
>
> Gahhh. Please don't blame bad code on the language.
>
> As the perl people say "there's more than 1 way to do it". Some of 
> those are going to be bad ;)
>
> Angie (Yes I'm a perl girl).
>
It's not the language that's the problem, It's the way this code has 
occurred. Back in the mid nineties or thereabouts a utility was written 
to pass e-mails from one system to another with a little checking and 
reformatting, then a second system decided it could use it, it was still 
internal to DEFRA with two customers. So then a farmer asked if he could 
use it to send data in and for some reason it was made publicly 
available to a few select big agricultural businesses, as a trial. Now 
it processes about sixty million records a year from thousands of 
sources, Farmers, Cattle markets, slaughterhouses, vets, trading 
standards, government labs, BCMS. At each stage someone has added or 
altered the code to work, added an extra program in and the like. So now 
we have a monster, it works, but we don't know why it does some things. 
Now we will need to migrate it to a new platform since the box it's been 
running on is falling apart and over twenty years old, as is the OS and 
mail program.

Today a farmer buying an off-the-shelf farm management package will get 
a form to complete to register himself to the system and we return a 
unique i.d. which he pops into the software and starts using. We would 
prefer to kill this system and migrate to a wep-app but with so many 
users actually using it it's not going to be easy

Trevor.