In the early 2000s I worked within a CORBA system. Daemons written in C++, servers in Java, and the system was scripted via Python. That you could instantiate

In the early 2000s I worked within a CORBA system. Daemons written in C++, servers in Java, and the system was scripted via Python. That you could instantiate an object from the C++ or Java sides in Python and do things with those services was actually quite fun. I was insulated from the difficulties of the CORBA implementation because the system came from a vendor, but bugs and performance issues were perpetual. And this system ran within the same local network behind the firewall. One of the truly sucky things about this system was it had its own version of Python server pages: Python and HTML intermixed within the same file, and whoa be to you if you got your Python indentation messed up between blocks of HTML. It was ridiculously hard to debug. And as the article points out, upgrading was a stop-the-world process where everything had to go offline, usually for hours. One of the other crippling "features" of this system were C++ objects persisted in the database as binary... man those caused headaches. And half the data was in DB2 and half in an LDAP server. This vendor never met a technology they didn't want to through into the mix.