26 May 2005
It was data crunching!
My recent wrangling of LDIF files is a classic case of Data Crunching, as outlined in Greg Wilson’s new book.
Reading an excerpt of this book, I realise that I’ve done a lot of this kind of work over the years. Greg makes it clear that, even if a program you write for crunching some data is Quick and Dirty™ (as we always called it when I was a graduate student), it should be well written, because you never know when you are going to need it again. Or worse, when someone else is going to need to pick it up and use it.
(Actually, I have already refactored my LDIF program into a pure-Java solution that can be used by any of the Java-heads at work. It also uses an vendor-supplied LDIF library, to remove the responsibility of parsing LDIF from my code. And I found a bug in the LDIF library!)
