[NCLUG] programming question

J. Paul Reed preed at sigkill.com
Sun Jul 1 23:53:38 MDT 2001


On Sun, 1 Jul 2001, S. Luke Jones wrote:

> ...and I felt compelled to chime in.  What Paul describes here is IMHO
> unacceptable. It might be the state of the art, or prevailing industry
> practice, but that doesn't make it right, or for that matter practical.

I disagree... I've seen it work very well in a number of cases.

I should clarify, though... I was a bit hard on the designers; it's not
that they can't write their own linked lists... it's just that they're
experts at design and design patterns at the expense of not knowing every
little (Visual) C++ compiler trick and being able to write assembly when
it's called for.

> There's this N-year old fantasy in the industry that you can have coders
> and architects (i.e. cheap people and expensive people) and so far as I
> can tell, it's never been proven to be effective.

I wasn't making the distinction between cheap people and expensive
people... that is were the analogy between architect and carpenter breaks
down.

Someone who truly knows how to write maintable, tight code is going to be
expensive. In the teams I've been involved with, it's not that there are
"cheap" and "expensive" people, but rather people who do the design, and
spend their efforts on that, and people who do implementation, and spend
their efforts on that... it's not as if they don't ever talk or work
together, but their roles are distinctly different, and I think that's what
makes the difference between a software engineer and a computer scientist.

That was the point I was trying to make.

> If you aren't any good at implementing, I'll wager your design is crap.

I have a professor who says design is not done until you have .h files. If
you can't code very well, getting the details of a "pre-project"
environment setup correctly is going to be hard.

> If you can't design, then the best you can hope for is an unmaintainable
> mess.

True... true...

Later,
Paul
  ----------------------------------------------------------------------
  J. Paul Reed                preed at sigkill.com || web.sigkill.com/preed
  Homer no function beer well without.  -- H. Simpson, "The Joy of Sect"






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