When Making a Comprehensive Retrofit of your Code...

chizor asks: "My programming team is considering making some sweeping changes to our code base (150+ perl CGIs, over a meg of code) in the interest of consistency and reducing redundancy. We're going to have to make some hard decisions about code style. What suggestions might readers have about tackling a large-scale retrofit?" Once the decision has been made for a sweeping rewrite of a project, what can you do to make sure things go smoothly and you don't run into any development snags...especially as things progress in the development cycle?

Comments

Rewriting Perl??! Print it out and burn it!

[SimHacker]

There's no point to rewriting Perl code.

The Perl language was designed to maximise maintenance costs, and to keep your coders employed and busy with nickle and dime shit work for the rest of their lives.

Print it all out and burn it. That's the only way to deal with Perl code.

I hope you fired the irresponsible slob who decided to write that must code in Perl a long time ago.

-Don

See no evil, hear no evil, ...?

[ProtonMotiveForce]

Why do people mod comments about alternatives as Flamebait (and presciently, this one)? Are people afraid to hear that you should't write large scale systems in Perl?

It really is valid (and in my opinion, correct) to say that if you _are_ going to do this you should look at other technologies and languages. Perl is for system administrators and system administrators-cum-developers, not real software development. Look at java. Look at PHP. Look at commercial and non-commerical web application systems, like Zope. Or don't rewrite it at all if it works. But for God's Sake, don't rewrite it in Perl - it's pointless.