5 Sep
2010
5 Sep
'10
1:42 p.m.
Gaius:
My usual rhetoric is that one-off, throwaway scripts never are, and not only do they tend to stay around but they take on a life of their own. Today's 10-line file munger is tomorrow's thousand-line ETL batch job on which the business depends for some crucial data - yet the original author is long gone and no-one dares modify in case it breaks. So it is just good sense to use sound practices from the very beginning.
I gave a tech talk recently on using Haskell for scripting -- and it is built on the idea that today's throw away script is tomorrow's key piece of infrastructure -- so you better get the maintainance and safety story right: http://donsbot.wordpress.com/2010/08/17/practical-haskell/