Yes, I believe the human component of scalability is important, and increasingly so as cost of hardware goes down, and programming time/cost increases.
Here's my own story that I think emphasizes your point: Three months ago I knew very little about Perl. I had heard of it, but that is about it. I have recently left a rather lucrative IT management job to get "back in the trenches" so to speak, after a 12 year hiatus from programming (I left off doing C programming in a Unix environment). My challenge was to develop an e-commerce web site for my brother-in-law for his business. I met with him (Pres/CEO) and his CIO, at which time the CIO told us that this project would take 9 months at least, and that is if I were a very experienced web programmer. (Their company, incidentally, uses MS tools/languages, etc.).
At that time, I thought that MS was the way to go, and also their current company environment. After several weeks of studying HTML and various VB tools/books, I was about to explode in exasperation; I would spend days fighting with a number of MS’s “controls”, only to find out later that they had this or that “bug” in them. About to give up, I then turned to Perl, since I liked the looks of it (similar to my work with C), heard good things about it, and, of course it is free!
Long story short, in 3 months I learned Perl (I’m not an expert, but picked up enough to program a relatively sophisticated e-commerce web site), learned Javascript, learned HTML, learned web-programming in general, installed/used MySQL (also new to me), and developed a relatively complex e-commerce site.
I met with the CEO and CIO last week to demonstrate my software. Although I could tell the CIO was more than just a bit shocked that I had done what I had done in considerably less than his "best-case" 9 months, he still had the political wherewithal to say, (in front of the CEO) ”Oh, you used Perl, that’s not scalable you know”. So thank you for this thread, I am now armed to do a little verbal butt-kicking myself (at the right political moment of course!).
Cheers,
Jim Wilson
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