[ale] Making the argument for many scripts vs one big one.

[Michael B. Trausch]

On 07/24/2013 01:50 PM, Jim Kinney wrote:
> That would depend, to me at least, on whether the final deployment is
> an internal or external tool. Internal gets the single blob. External
> gets a zillion files. The logic is to make it confusing to the
> external (l)user so they won't tinker with things. Bonus points if the
> zillion files all look like obfuscated perl :-)

Hrm... we need a minification tool for Bash.

Perl, obviously, doesn't need one.  Just remove the whitespace, it's
ugly and cryptic all by itself.  :-D

> I saw a system once that had a shell application that called a zillion
> files. The customer wanted the development team to go away but was
> worried about what all the application did. So I went over it with a
> fine tooth comb. Basically, the application consisted of 4 or 5 main
> script files that each would call 20-30 of the crap files to do things
> like count lines and characters but then dump the results without ever
> using them. So there was 150-200 scripts that were culled from the
> process after some careful refactoring in the 5 main ones. Then I ran
> into funny issues that were sort of like race conditions but not
> quite. The zillion crap scripts were created to slow down the main
> scripts so it was closer to the original system that ran at 300MHz
> instead of the now 1.5 GHz. It was using many serial ports to get data
> from lab systems. I replaced the lot with a few sleep calls to allow
> the serial port data to accumulate and the developers were dumped.

Nice.  :-)

A tool like Closure would actually be really neat for things like bash,
python, perl, etc.

Well, not Python, since Python actually relies on whitespace for semantics.

Of course, if you have a gazillion things that can cause deadlocks or
have race conditions, you absolutely want things in a single program,
even if the work is itself spread over different modules.  Sounds like
the perfect thing for C.

    --- Mike


-- 
Naunet Corporation Logo 	Michael B. Trausch

President, *Naunet Corporation*
? (678) 287-0693 x130 or (888) 494-5810 x130

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