Path: ...!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro 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) Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 22 Message-ID: References: <9OCcnRW7grqkbPT6nZ2dnZfqnPUAAAAA@earthlink.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Injection-Date: Sun, 05 Jan 2025 03:57:40 +0100 (CET) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="c85702e5c6cceae706a35141fa55e6e0"; logging-data="777608"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX19Hy+iJ8xJyopw0E8d2lwGM" User-Agent: Pan/0.161 (Chasiv Yar; ) Cancel-Lock: sha1:lVkVX26+Ise7p3VxFS6DiXMIXBQ= Bytes: 2775 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.