Python in Process Control?

[Neil Benn]

Carlos Ribeiro wrote:

>On Tue, 05 Oct 2004 21:51:31 GMT, Andrea Griffini <agriff at tin.it> wrote:
>  
>
>>On Tue, 5 Oct 2004 12:12:39 -0300, Carlos Ribeiro
>><carribeiro at gmail.com> wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>Keeping with the same reasoning line, why don't the engineers that
>>>work in the company take more responsibility? Because they were never
>>>in such a position. They don't have a choice. They have to keep things
>>>running, period. The one who messes up with stuff is fired. And doing
>>>development is not their company business, anyway. Want to do it? Go
>>>working for a vendor.
>>>      
>>>
>>Well... in our case we have customers that didn't probably
>>see an engineer in past 10 years. Still they can buy and use
>>rather hi-tech machines from us that cost several tens of
>>thousands of dollars. It doesn't come as a surprise to me they
>>don't want to take the responsibility for them being functional.
>>    
>>
>
>I was afraid that my experience would not reflect the state of the art
>elsewhere. Seems it wasn't any far from truth :-)
>  
>
    Engineers working at a user site need to be multi skilled (external 
facing, internal facing, technically competent) and therefore 
expensive.  If you have an  engineer who you want to do development, 
cha-ching add in some more salary.  I would much much prefer to have no 
engineer that an incompetent one and a competent one costs a lot of 
money - something that some companies may not be able to afford. 

    To the money men thing - if that is your experience then the company 
was run incorrectly - most people I speak to - a purchase decision is 
made between the user, on -site engineer, finance and managers.  Any 
company in which the finance department purchases equipment without 
consulting the people involved in the process is bad, bad - bad!

>  
>
>>A sad part is that sometimes our customer support has to
>>spend time to explain people what does it mean to copy a file
>>from a floppy disk to a certain directory; but I've to say
>>that the users that create more troubles are actually the
>>"expert" ones. I would actually refuse to provide any support
>>to anyone relinking my application with a newer versions of
>>a library... you really wanna do it ? You're welcome, but
>>don't call me if something doesn't work and you've something
>>urgent to do with the system... unless you really like being
>>insulted over the phone. Luckily this doesn't happen often...
>>It's much more common (and a bit annoying) to see someone
>>fearing updates...
>>    
>>
>
>When the market finally awakes from the stone age, you'll surely start
>to get more calls like this. Not only from people relinking, but
>patches, and *real* bug tickets found by your very customers. Get used
>to it. You can't complain this way once the market is open.
>  
>
    Yes you can, if you open something up you will _still_ get people 
screwing things up.  Suppose a customer smashes a new machine up because 
he or she 'had a play' with the machine using the low level code (if  I 
wasn't meant to use this code then why did you give it to me?).  The as 
the vendor what happens next; the customer will either lie - leading the 
vendor to determine whether or not to pull the customer up and charge 
them; they could tell the truth and beg/insist on not paying for the 
repair or they could pay up - which will sour the vendor/user 
relationship.  Personally, I _never_ take a machine apart unless I've 
been trained to do it.  I also set out the terms of what happens if I 
screw up with the vendor before I accept and they give me the control 
codes.  If you open-source this stuff then you lose this control and 
people will smash your machines up - the only thing you can count on is 
people making mistakes!!

    I agree that the industry is behind but open-sourcing an industry 
will not immediately remove all the problems and issues - that's too 
simplistic a view point.

Cheers,

Neil

-- 

Neil Benn
Senior Automation Engineer
Cenix BioScience
BioInnovations Zentrum
Tatzberg 47
D-01307
Dresden
Germany

Tel : +49 (0)351 4173 154
e-mail : benn at cenix-bioscience.com
Cenix Website : http://www.cenix-bioscience.com