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From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>
Newsgroups: alt.comp.os.windows-11,comp.os.linux.advocacy
Subject: Re: The problem with not owning the software
Date: Sun, 5 Jan 2025 02:57:40 -0000 (UTC)
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On Sat, 4 Jan 2025 21:17:47 -0500, Paul wrote:

> At another place I worked, it was PERL. The CAD tools had a few
> shortcomings, and on some days, if you walked by desks, everyone
> was coding in PERL to make up for the productivity shortfall of
> the CAD tool. The funny part, was when one of our engineers won
> the award with that brand of software, for the "most complex design
> of the year" using the stuff. The potential customers would think
> the CAD tool had done the work, when it was something like a hundred
> individual PERL scripts that managed the design (the PERL updated
> signal lists on wide buses in the design -- the CAD tool expected
> you to "click each one and edit it", which is idiotic).

Were your Perl scripts able to access the CAD files directly? Were they in 
some non-proprietary format?

On the one hand, this kind of labour-saving operation is exactly why 
programmable computers were invented. On the other hand, as you mentioned, 
too much of the credit tends to go to the name-brand proprietary tool at 
the most conspicuous point of your workflow, instead of the generalized 
open-source toolkit operating in the background, that greatly simplified 
the major part of the work.