An Army Medal For Coding In Perl 192
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."
Shoulda got a purple heart (Score:5, Funny)
...for coding in Perl.
I'm amazed he wasn't thrown in the brig. (Score:4, Funny)
That sounds like hacking to me.
A purple heart? (Score:4, Funny)
There's a metal for those wounded in combat, and Perl cuts psyches deeply indeed.
Re: This is dumb (Score:2, Funny)
Well, at least the Army has 'L' keys that work properly.
Re:A purple heart? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Shoulda got a purple heart (Score:5, Funny)
They don't give you a Purple Heart for shooting yourself in the foot.
Re: Metal (Score:2, Funny)
I have an equivalent script in VB.Net. Without doubt, it's the finest 1,702 lines of code I've ever seen.