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Which languages do you use most often? Languages are not created equal, some are clearly superior to others for a given task. If you can develop effectively in

by plesiv 6y ago

Which languages do you use most often? Languages are not created equal, some are clearly superior to others for a given task. If you can develop effectively in a better programming language, then why wouldn't you invest more effort in making the implementation of your task in that language more foolproof? Write better tests, clean-up the interfaces, you can even try to use formal methods to ensure correctness etc.

forgotmypw17 6y ago
Perl is the language I use most often for processing, with bash and PHP for redundancy and glue. As others mentioned, I chose Perl and PHP because those are the languages I am most familiar with, and because they are "boring", meaning they've been stable enough that I could've written my scripts 20 years ago, and they would still work today. PHP to a lesser extent, but still true. Also, as I mentioned the "lowest common denominator" style of writing allows me to write Perl which I can copy and paste into PHP almost without changes, and vice-versa. To facilitate this, I ported several functions from one to the other, e.g. str_replace for Perl and and index() for PHP. I can't think of ways to make it more foolproof than writing two redundant systems, nor how much better tests I can have than full coverage of each process by a redundant one, except by introducing triple-redundancy, which is not out of the question. Is that what you had in mind, or something else?
- plesiv 6y ago
  OK, I get it :)
  - forgotmypw17 6y ago
    Going back to your comment, I feel like I missed this part, or at least did not address it: >Write better tests, clean-up the interfaces, you can even try to use formal methods to ensure correctness etc. I definitely put effort into all these things, but my experience shows that no matter how much work goes into that, things will find a way to fail in a way I could not predict.

by plesiv 6y ago

forgotmypw17 6y ago

Perl is the language I use most often for processing, with bash and PHP for redundancy and glue. As others mentioned, I chose Perl and PHP because those are the languages I am most familiar with, and because they are "boring", meaning they've been stable enough that I could've written my scripts 20 years ago, and they would still work today. PHP to a lesser extent, but still true. Also, as I mentioned the "lowest common denominator" style of writing allows me to write Perl which I can copy and paste into PHP almost without changes, and vice-versa. To facilitate this, I ported several functions from one to the other, e.g. str_replace for Perl and and index() for PHP. I can't think of ways to make it more foolproof than writing two redundant systems, nor how much better tests I can have than full coverage of each process by a redundant one, except by introducing triple-redundancy, which is not out of the question. Is that what you had in mind, or something else?

plesiv 6y ago
OK, I get it :)
- forgotmypw17 6y ago
  Going back to your comment, I feel like I missed this part, or at least did not address it: >Write better tests, clean-up the interfaces, you can even try to use formal methods to ensure correctness etc. I definitely put effort into all these things, but my experience shows that no matter how much work goes into that, things will find a way to fail in a way I could not predict.