code (was Re: opacity)

Kelley kwalker2 at gte.net
Tue Aug 28 04:09:14 PDT 2001



>
>=============
>Naming/organizing info-space-time is a big friggin' headache. Naming
>atoms was *easy*.
>
>Ian

from another list:

someone wrote:

> I must confess that each and every time I reuse a common design, I feel

> as if that is a sign of our profession's failure. Unlike wood, cable,

> and flesh, software is subject -- already! -- to complete manipulation

> by other software. At the very least, shouldn't we be able to point to

> the design we select, point to where it needs to be applied, and say

> "*that* design, *there*," without ever having to write i++?? Writing

> code that implements a design the n-th time is downright tedious, though

> it does seem that the language changes every few years.

the reply (it's quite amusing...):

No no no, that's the POINT!

It is that tedious BS that keeps coders working their day job.

You don't really think there would be work for more then say 30 coders if they were actually expected to do something NEW do you? (10 at Apple to invent it, 10 at MS to copy them, 10 open source guys to copy MS/Apple)

Coding isnt a field like the rest you list where someone has to physicly do something. Once someone writes the script, noone ever has to do anything again. So instead, we keep rewriting the script over and over.

My n-2 day job I had figured out in 2 days, we had meetings for the other few months I was there, about adding features we never implemented anyway, and then they cancelled the project 2 weeks after I left. I remember alot of waiting 2 months for the Java team of like 20 people to implement something that was about 10 lines of PHP.

At my n-1 day job, as far as I can tell, we were adding one feature to an internal tool by rewriting the whole thing, but with all the meetings, I dont even know what we were doing.

So shut up about reuse already. Do you want to destroy the whole programming field or something? My god, if management ever figured this out... glad they are too busy in meetings.

BTW, too much code is now in Java or Perl, what's next? XML and friends show real promise for years and years of surfing the web.. er day jobs.



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