Reply to: Good programming is hard, and therefore rare

[expat]

Shouldn't there be an "however improbable" bit in there?

No shi t...

Forgot: I don't find the maxim useful, anyway, since by the time I've finished I've usually eliminated everything.

[DaveB]

It's taken until now to figure out that the left & right motors in the buggy thing I'm working on are transposed.

It's a wunnerful thing hardware...

Thought it was a bit bizarre.

Dont forget to leave that little feature in for your students. Should keep them on their toes

[Bernard Common]

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains must be the truth.

Shouldn't there be an "however improbable" bit in there?

[zathras]

In the electricity industry and even more so in the gas industry, if you do bad work you can go to gaol...

If you get it wrong in either you might find yourself sampling the delights or otherwise of the local mortuary, that and you have to spend no longer wondering if there is a God or not.

[expat]

It's taken until now to figure out that the left & right motors in the buggy thing I'm working on are transposed.

It's a wunnerful thing hardware...

Thought it was a bit bizarre.

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains must be the truth.

[expat]

'King 'Eck, Gibbon, you must be almost as old as me...

I did once see someone trying to stick the chad back into a punched card to alter a program...

Sh it! Caught again!

[Gibbon]

If you can think and solve problems logically and sometimes laterally then you can become a good programmer. Any code language is only a tool that can be learnt, intelligence can't be.

I was taught programming in the forces and we had to go on a very intensive course. I had until then had no interest in computers and I was forced to go on this course. There was one guy there who knew everything about Basic and Pascal and openly sneered at my almost nonexistent keyboard skills. The look on his face at the end of the course when I gained a significantly higher grade than him was a picture. He knew all the syntax and constructs but had no ability to use them.

I started programming on an Elliot 920 in octal machine code when a patch was just that, a paper tape patch of holes that was 'patched' onto the original paper tape. Oh the joy of searching through the link-memory maps for an empty area of memory in which to put the modifications.

[expat]

char **ptrptrMyPtr;

I wrote something like that once. Didn't believe it would work, but it did.

[Churchill]

Seemed to despise pointers also.

char **ptrptrMyPtr;

[lilelvis2000]

What the feck does he know?

Doesn't even like GOTOs...

Seemed to despise pointers also.

[Joe Black]

In the electricity industry and even more so in the gas industry, if you do bad work you can go to gaol...

Quite true. But then badly done electrical and gas work can quickly cost people their lives.

Badly done IT just costs money, a few jobs perhaps...and in some projects, e.g. CSA, tax credits etc only deprives people of enough money to buy food and things.

Not quite the same I guess?

[expat]

Plainly an idiot.

Just look at Pascal.

Blaise?

[expat]

What the feck does he know?

Doesn't even like GOTOs...

And doesn't believe in COMEFROMs.

[expat]

In the electricity industry and even more so in the gas industry, if you do bad work you can go to gaol...

Dijkstra said: knowing a programming language does not make you a programmer. Knowing how to think does that.

[Jobberwacky]

And demeans us. Years of education and experience are made equivalent to some 13-year-old's hobby. I'm not a geek, I'm a professional.

And so are the slappers at King's Cross. Programming attracts the pedants, the loners, the social misfits, the losers, the unwashed, the anally retentive. They think that makes them clever, clever through complexity, like a car mechanic who thinks he is above his customers because he knows more about a very particular engine. But he isn't compared to the intellectual class of which I am representative. He is as thick as sh*t, and so are all of you.