[geeks] Misuse of Java

[Jonathan C Patschke]

On Wednesday, November 6, 2002, at 11:17 AM, Dave McGuire wrote:

>   Well I haven't seen any references to that, but the basic idea is 
> valuing good code over good documentation.  Too many "engineers" hide 
> behind design and documentation "work" and never really PRODUCE 
> anything that actually works.

This sounds more like what's been called RAD everywhere I've worked.  
It's a good philosophy, but I tend to be working on so many things at 
once that I'd lose my place in the code unless it's extremely 
well-documented.  So, for the stuff I do for me, it's almost all 
documentation (since I have little time to code on my toys).  For the 
stuff that I (occasionally) get paid to do, it's almost all code, with 
enough documentation there to let people know how it works and what the 
interfaces are.

"Extreme Programming" at Rice was just another term for "Team 
Programming" on a single terminal; the idea being that someone hovering 
over your shoulder can catch when you type pritnf instead of printf, or 
something stupid like that.  They thought it was some sort of holy 
grail, and you couldn't opt out of it in several required courses.  In 
fact, if you wrote code, at any time, without your partner sitting 
beside you (say he went to go take a leak or somesuch, and you typed 
`\n");'), your assignment was an automatic F.  Let me just say that 
this policy fucked me over royally[1], and I would have my degree right 
now had it not been present.  Yes, I'm bitter.


[1] No, I didn't break the rules (thought I should have, in 
retrospect).  My partner and I had very incompatible schedules, and we 
weren't allowed to regroup.
--
Jonathan C. Patschke
Celestrion Information Systems
Thorndale, TX