Fwd: Re: [Pdx-pm] Software development and The Rules

[Ovid]

Somehow, I managed to reply to Joe without copying the group :(

--- Ovid <poec at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- Joe Oppegaard <joe at joppegaard.com> wrote:
> > It seems like 75% of the software developers out there don't follow The Rules 
> > (or know why they are breaking them), at least this would be the assumption to 
> > make after reading books like The Pragmatic Programmer, The Practice of 
> > Programming, or just hearing people talk about their peers at work. 
> > 
> > As I've never had a job as a software developer, I don't know how true that 
> > assumption is. Is it one of those wonders of society where everyone Knows they 
> > are good, yet they also Know most everyone else is sub-par? (ie. driving).  
> 
> I met a software developer who admitted that she was a rotten programmer, but she's the only one
> I've ever heard say that.  Most programmers have this idea that because their software works,
> they're good.  Unfortunately, other considerations apply.  
> 
> For example, if it takes me three months to develop a work of software "art" that a competant
> programmer can develop in a week, I'm not a cost-effective programmer.  If my code is
> unmaintainable (much of what my presentation was about), then I'm not a good programmer.  If my
> code assumes that its environment will never change, I'm probably a short-sighted programmer.
> 
> However, it gets more subtle than that.  I might be a great procedural programmer and assume
> that
> I  will therefore be a great object-oriented programmer.  Later, when I have my
> Employee::Manager
> and Employee::Programmer subclasses of Employee and wonder what to do when a manager is also a
> programmer, I realize that I possibly screwed up somewhere (hint to OO programmers:  subclass
> nouns, not adjectives).
> 
> Personally, I consider myself to be rather knowledgeable about Perl, but only a middling
> programmer.  However, I used to think I was a great programmer.  It's only through constant
> studying that I realized that I'm not as good as I thought :)  We programmers, as chromatic
> pointed out, can be a rather egotistical lot.  When we can learn to be humble and say "I'm
> wrong",
> we can become better programmers.
> 
> Incidentally, most programmers that I have encountered are awful.  By being willing to learn
> what
> constitutes good programming, a person can definitely improve dramatically in relation to
> others.
 
Cheers,
Curtis "Ovid" Poe


=====
"Ovid" on http://www.perlmonks.org/
Someone asked me how to count to 10 in Perl:
push at A,$_ for reverse q.e...q.n.;for(@A){$_=unpack(q|c|,$_);@a=split//;
shift at a;shift at a if $a[$[]eq$[;$_=join q||, at a};print $_,$/for reverse @A

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