Re: The problem with not owning the software

On Sat, 4 Jan 2025 21:17:47 -0500, Paul wrote:

At another place I worked, it was PERL. The CAD tools had a few
shortcomings, and on some days, if you walked by desks, everyone
was coding in PERL to make up for the productivity shortfall of
the CAD tool. The funny part, was when one of our engineers won
the award with that brand of software, for the "most complex design
of the year" using the stuff. The potential customers would think
the CAD tool had done the work, when it was something like a hundred
individual PERL scripts that managed the design (the PERL updated
signal lists on wide buses in the design -- the CAD tool expected
you to "click each one and edit it", which is idiotic).

Were your Perl scripts able to access the CAD files directly? Were they in
some non-proprietary format?

On the one hand, this kind of labour-saving operation is exactly why
programmable computers were invented. On the other hand, as you mentioned,
too much of the credit tends to go to the name-brand proprietary tool at
the most conspicuous point of your workflow, instead of the generalized
open-source toolkit operating in the background, that greatly simplified
the major part of the work.