RE: Standards/reasonable programming practices (&GPP)

Hello All! It's one of the great achievements of human thought encountered in this thread: > Yep! Bunch of Clueless )*(&^*^ers. My latest theory is that the > undisplined youths you heard about on TV - their generation > are now coming out of university from CS courses and creaing crap code. > > I'll have a job for live fixing their code and my ability will show > as more of them appear an the overall quality of coders goes down. > > Welcome cool windoze coders with their fab graphics/icons, you'll > keep me employed for life on a good salary as a top coder.... IMHO, it's not so plain. Maybe, You think that command-line tools make a person a good coder and the modern IDEs do the reverse job? Sorry, the basic principles of programming (like the famous Dijkstra's theorem) doesn't depend on the IDE. It's quite possible to write a good code in Delphi and abominable spam in GNU C. Also, I've never heard of colleges, universities and even CS courses where the folks are taught to write code bad code or use the Clipboard instead of procedures and functions. However, when the developer comes to the company, the managers usually require to create something ASAP, with no attention to such insignificant things like good programming practice, robustness, GUI logic etc., but with great attention to their own prejudices in the sphere of GUI. The managers need manageable people, who can be easily manipulated and replaced at any time. IMHO, good developers aren't usually folks of the kind. You probably could see the announcements of the RAD tools allowing 'the beginners to create full- featured applications' (especially, the notorious SQL Windows). Maybe, the developers could say this? In any environment, in any OS, the skills, knowledge, experience and culture are required to write something other than 'Hello, World' with multiple bugs. It's common practice to criticize Microsoft and its products. However, who prohibits to buy and use X Window based systems? Nobody, it's also a managerial issue, known as seeking for cheese for free. To some points, the vendors of UNIX and UNIX systems aren't also innocent. When I buy a copy of Borland C++ or Delphi, I get the fully functional development tool with all the functionality of the operating system available. However, I have some experience with SPARCompiler C++. We paid $2000 for it, and what we got? The plain command line compiler, without even the manuals on OpenLook objects, without programmatic interfaces to XIL and XGL libraries, with MakeTool dumping core instead of running. Maybe, this practice could increase the amount of applications written for Solaris/OpenWindows and thus the interest of users to this system? Buttons and icons allow a serious programmer to concentrate on the program and its objects rather than on the syntax of makefiles and ways of finding the necessary line in the text editor. To the bad programmer, they give a chance to eventually create something formally resembling an executable. But, IMHO, there's no reason to confuse such activities with the Software Engineering. In any case, I see many folks claiming Linux the best operating system. My own experience confirms it. Why? Linux was created by the community of developers rather than by spam-sellers. So, IMHO, Windows has done its very useful job. It made the customers to purchase the systems capable of running normal operating systems. DOS couldn't do it. So, in my opinion, the summary is the following. The developers would turn to good programming practice only when the users will definitely request for good software. Also, the developers are at least not only folks to be claimed guilty here. Igor I. Lisyansky, Software Engineer