(no subject)
I have obtained the rank of ubergeek since my name was used as an adverb yesterday. (And if it wasn’t used as an adverb, I’m sure Honor will correct me) Apparently I “went all Dan on the scripts”. This means I took a mess of poorly written scripts that take days to configure and run successfully and rewrote them in the “arcane programming language of Perl” so that the user can enter in a few necessary field, then the scripts run and generate the hundreds of pages of output automagically.
Personally, I don’t know what scares me more. The fact that my cow-orkers consider Perl an arcance language or the fact I’ve had done this so many times, they can now use my name as an adverb. Mind you I work at a nuclear power plant, which aren’t know for being on the cutting edge of technology. I’m also still trying to impress on some of the people out there that the purpose of computers isn’t to make neat program, it’s to make life easier. Computer are supposed to do the hard repetitive grunt work, like processing a couple of hundred megs of data to generate hundreds of graphs. The humans are supposed to take those graphs and use them to make important decisions about operating the nuclear power plant. The purpose of the computer isn’t to make the average user into a programmer. More than once I’ve taken a ghod awful collection of programs and scripts that have been hacked together and break the moment something changes (like a path) and spent a week or so pounding them into a dependable program that saves a couple of man weeks of work every time they run the program. And the folks at work seem to think this is a small miracle, but they don’t get out much.
Personally, I don’t know what scares me more. The fact that my cow-orkers consider Perl an arcance language or the fact I’ve had done this so many times, they can now use my name as an adverb. Mind you I work at a nuclear power plant, which aren’t know for being on the cutting edge of technology. I’m also still trying to impress on some of the people out there that the purpose of computers isn’t to make neat program, it’s to make life easier. Computer are supposed to do the hard repetitive grunt work, like processing a couple of hundred megs of data to generate hundreds of graphs. The humans are supposed to take those graphs and use them to make important decisions about operating the nuclear power plant. The purpose of the computer isn’t to make the average user into a programmer. More than once I’ve taken a ghod awful collection of programs and scripts that have been hacked together and break the moment something changes (like a path) and spent a week or so pounding them into a dependable program that saves a couple of man weeks of work every time they run the program. And the folks at work seem to think this is a small miracle, but they don’t get out much.