[PEN-L:28680] Re: Re: Re: Re: Drudgery

[joanna bujes <joanna.bujes@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 06:53 PM 07/26/2002 -0500, you wrote:
> This part is simply absurd! It's the software engineers, not Bill Gates
> et al who keep Microsoft undemocratic?

Well, I couldn't quite follow the argument's in Ian's post. When stuff gets
too abstract, I have problems.  However, "writing unmaintainable code" IS a
running joke among software engineers. In certain contexts, hogging
technology or monopolizing its secrets, is a "job security" tactic--not
just for Bill Gates, but also for the poor drones that write software.

A friend went to work for Adobe Photoshop a few years ago. To his horror,
he discovered that the million or so lines of code that make up that
application, had no comments. (In order for code to be comprehensible, it
really, really helps if there are ordinary language comments that describe
what the code is trying to do.)

Why were there no comments?  If the code had been commented, any
experienced egineer could walk in and continue to develop this code, debug
it, etc. But, without comments, this became a herculean task for any except
the author of the code. (Probably, given the size of the code, it would be
a hard task for the creator too.)

I'm not making any deep argument about human nature here...just about how
context affects the best laid plans...

Joanna