When objects don’t respond to messages (follow-up on Alan Kay OOP discussion)

I say “ETL” in scare quotes because obviously you don’t want to take a highly-paid software developer off of their work for several days of manual data cleanup just so you can process an Excel document. After a few months, I had rewritten the ETL system to be a fault-tolerant, rules-driven system that could handle the radically different data formats that pharmaceutical companies kept sending us.3 More importatnly, instead of two days of hands-on work from one of our developers, it turned into two hours of automated work, leaving the developers free to do other tasks. This is the very definition of “bad data” but it was critical that the ETL system work and, as it turns out, it’s a fairly well-understood problem and there are many approaches.

Source: ovid.github.io