use Perl

• You're doing fine (Score:2)

  by jdavidb (1361)

  When I'm finished with this, I will be in exactly the same place as over a year ago. I mean, I'll be a better programmer, and know a lot more, but this code has been in production use the whole time and no one knows I've done anything at all.

  You've actually accomplished something great, then. The code will be much more maintainable. I'd see lines of code eliminated as a good metric of how much you've simplified the system.

  Throwing code out is liberating. Gets rid of bugs, too.

  I suppose this is a

  --
  J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
  • Re:You're doing fine (Score:2)

    by ziggy (25)

    You've actually accomplished something great, then. The code will be much more maintainable. I'd see lines of code eliminated as a good metric of how much you've simplified the system.

    There's a scene in Revenge of the Nerds, where someone from Microsoft (I think it was Steve Ballmer) talks about what it was like working with IBM on OS/2.

    The IBM developers were stodgy old mainframe types, who were very regimented, hierarchical and by-the-book. The developers Microsoft contributed to the project wer
    • Re:You're doing fine (Score:1)

      by Timbo (4486)

      I think maybe you meant Triumph of the Nerds [pbs.org], an excellent PBS show by Robert X. Cringely, not Revenge of the Nerds [imdb.com], an '80s teen flick with little to recommend it.
      • Re:You're doing fine (Score:1)

        by trachtenberga (3651)

        Except Ted McGinley!
• On Refactoring (Score:2)

  by ziggy (25)

  Refactoring is a hard sell with a program that works and doesn't need to be updated. As programmers, we deal with writing code (and debugging it, of course), so our focus is on projects that need work. We tend to ignore projects that are "complete" and don't need additional labor.

  Cringely picked up on this [pbs.org] a few months back. When it comes to working bodies of code, going back and refactoring something stable is a waste of time. But Cringley's ideas of an army of helpful Refactoring Gnomes is specious,
• You are to be congratulated (Score:2, Informative)

  by jordan (120)

  If you did all that internals work and nobody noticed.
  

  Usually, when I do major rewrites, bugs and problems inevitably turn up. It shows that you worked deliberately and carefully and tested well.
  

  Congratulations!
  

  And remember, it's the journey (becoming a better programmer) and not the destination (source code) that is all the fun.