Re: Unwritten Perl Books

[WhiteBird]

The book I would like to read (or maybe someday write) is "Perl/Magic Programming". There's a limited audience for the subject matter, so I'll probably never see it, but I like the opportunity to dream.

I work with Meditech, a very proprietary hospital system that is programmed in a language called "Magic". (Are any of you Monks familiar with it?) It's a difficult system to interface with, but it is possible to do some scripting into it using Visual Basic and some windows dlls.

One of my goals is to write a Perl scripting interface into Magic. I suspect that if VB can communicate with Meditech then Perl should be able to as well. And I suspect Perl could do it with less code and less overhead. But since the book hasn't been written yet, I guess I'll have to figure out how to get it done and write the book myself.

[FoxtrotUniform]

I work with Meditech, a very proprietary hospital system that is programmed in a language called "Magic". (Are any of you Monks familiar with it?) It's a difficult system to interface with, but it is possible to do some scripting into it using Visual Basic and some windows dlls.

I had a similar problem once, although rather than Magic I was stuck with a rather awful (er, "beginner-friendly") scripting language for a thankfully-mostly-forgotten IVR system. The first project I had to write was a nightmare. The second one was easier: prompted by the local guru, I'd written a set of Perl scripts to translate an XML descriptiom into a code framework. By the time I left that job, my Perl scripts were generating all the code I needed, as well as all of the supporting documentation and even the test suites.

The moral of that story: if you can't write code to solve your problems in a sane language, write code that writes code to solve your problems in a sane language.