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Re: Damnit Jim, I'm a Writer, not a Programmer II: The Wrath of K ahn
Subject:Re: Damnit Jim, I'm a Writer, not a Programmer II: The Wrath of K ahn From:Peter <pnewman1 -at- home -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Fri, 06 Jul 2001 20:03:44 -0400
Arlen -dot- P -dot- Walker -at- jci -dot- com wrote:
>
> Bingo! Reading code is actually quite a bit easier than people think. If
> it's done by a competent professional programmer, it'll seem like reading a
> very abbreviated form of english. I suspect the tech writer who failed to
> get the job failed, not because he couldn't read code, but because he
> wouldn't try. I'd have declined to hire him myself, were I in a position
> to. Prima donnas are a pain to work with.
>
> Try an experiment sometime. Next time you're in a bookstore, go pick up one
> of those dreaded programming books and flip it open to a random page near
> the middle, and the next code fragment you encounter, try to figure out
> what it does. I'll bet more than half of you will decode a significant
> portion of it, without prior knowledge even of the language it's written
> in.
>
for you non-programmers. try to decipher the meaning of a statement such
as
fprintf(urt, "%f.6 %s " , dr, (i=0;1+%r\d;++i));
Without a basic understanding of the language, few could tell whether I
have made a syntax error, never mind the meaning.
--
Peter
Mailto:peternew -at- optonline -dot- net
Adapting old programs to fit new machines
usually means adapting new machines to
behave like old ones.
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