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An Army Medal For Coding In Perl
shocking writes: Arizona National Guard member Vivin Paliath was surprised to be commended for writing Perl scripts and Excel macros while his unit was deployed in Iraq. His work automated a number of previously manual processes that were part of the logistics processes of his unit. He wrote, '[A]s a programmer, I'm constantly looking for ways to make my job easy. I didn't want to sit and add qualifications, and print licenses one by one. I was too lazy for that, and worse, the whole thing was horribly inefficient. So I decided to figure out how to automate the process. ... I started writing Perl scripts to query the data. By the time we had reached Iraq, I had a working script that generated licenses as text files for all the soldiers. The script only took a second or two to run, and the longest part of the process was simply printing out the licenses. But I wasn't done yet. I was still annoyed that I would have to add driver qualifications manually. So I wrote another script that would go and add qualifications to drivers en masse. The script even had a configuration file where you could specify what qualifications you wanted to add and to whom."
...for coding in Perl.
That sounds like hacking to me.
There's a metal for those wounded in combat, and Perl cuts psyches deeply indeed.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Well, at least the Army has 'L' keys that work properly.
I have an equivalent script in VB.Net. Without doubt, it's the finest 1,702 lines of code I've ever seen.