On Fri, 02 Apr 2010 13:48:48 BST, Michael Dillon said:
So, what are you having your up-and-coming NOC staff read?
In an attempt to wean them off of unmanageable PERL scripts
There is not, and there never will be, a useful programming language that makes it the least bit difficult to write totally abominable creeping-horror unmaintainable code in. The ability of a programmer to write totally obtuse code is entirely orthogonal to the choice of implementation language. Some people just don't have good taste, and will produce train wrecks in any language. Remember that it's possible to write Fortran-IV code in any language. :) Unless you teach them stuff like "Document the sources and expected types of input data", "add useful comments that explain your choice of algorithms rather than "a++; /* Add one to A */", and "If the language supports operator overloading, don't be a bozo and abuse it", the code will be unmaintainable.