May 12, 2015 at 4:31 pm
...and then go to the pub 🙂
Gaz
-- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!
May 12, 2015 at 6:09 pm
Gary Varga (5/12/2015)
...and then go to the pub 🙂
Heh... that's the ultimate in "open minds" for me because just about ANY pub will do! 😛
--Jeff Moden
May 14, 2015 at 11:54 am
I agree rather strongly with Jeff's major rant! I've seen it happen rather often.
Anyway, a main point of Phil's editorial is, I think, that people need to have a reasonably wide base of knowledge. I find myself in complete agreement with that, because I see overspecialisation as one of the biggest problems in the software development industry.
And I have maybe too much experience of Phil's "young programmers tend to laboriously explain Object-oriented programming to me" but I adopted a different approach to it. After all, OO programming is just a fancy name for taking to foolish extremes a bunch of techniques developed in the 50s and the 60s and my personal view of it is that it is the principal cause of Wirth's law ("software is getting slower faster than hardware is getting faster) although Wirth himself never admitted that and of the increasing complexity and lack of transparency of software. So when confronted by some bright young kid who wanted to tell me all about how wonderful OOP is I told them to go away and read and understand the Cardelli-Wegner type theory survey paper, and the Abadi-Cardelli book on the theoretical foundations of OOP, and write up what they thought had been achieved out of Cardelli's list of essential improvements (Bad Properties of OO and then come back and talk to me about OOP when they had learnt at least the basics of the fundmental ideas behind it. (The young kids who think OO is wonderful are always the ones lacking even basic education in the science of software engineering - although they often have degrees in computer science.)
Tom
May 15, 2015 at 4:55 am
Yes, you're right. We must operate from a broad base of knowledge rather than expect to survive on 'training' in specialized techniques. Although OO is now quite rightly embedded in our technical culture, it is just another programming technique. So often, I've seen the consequences of rigid conformance to OO techniques to the point where it has become a quasi-religious mania.
@david.Poole
I've also served my time on hands and knees laying cable in roofspaces. I still have my crimping tools. I still value the experience of doing this, as well as support, and production maintenance work. Experience is the best way of understanding the whole application lifecycle. You get to understand the other team's point of view!
@jeff Moden
I'd love it if the youngsters were to listen to the 'old farts' occasionally rather than explain laboriously to them how to work their mobile phones and witter on about 'object persistence'. You should be writing some of these guest editorials for DBW. It would liven things up. Tony would be very grateful!
Best wishes,
Phil Factor
May 15, 2015 at 8:18 pm
Thanks for the encouragement, Phil, but I'd rather stick to the technical articles and let the code do the talking. It's also much more fun to follow your very well aimed lead than to come up with the original editorial. 😛
--Jeff Moden
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