At 09:46 AM 5/25/00 -0400, Vanderhoof, Tzadik wrote:
> >By "possibility" I mean "using a minimum of logic, a novice Perl programmer
> >still might get confused." If someone is confused by either of those last
> >wo examples, well, I don't want that person working on my code. :-)
>
>I take issue with being obliged to write so that the "novice" programmer
>will understand my code easily, and this applies to any programming
>language.
IMHO the real answer is that you need to design the code appropriately to
the level of person likely to be looking at it, whether they be novice or guru.
Some years ago I got a code review of a C program I wrote. Two people were
fairly novice programmers, one was an expert. When they got to the
recursive descent parser the novices said, Whoa, what is this thing,
explain? The other one said, It's just your standard RDP: first it does
the left side, then it does the right side; next. Documentation and coding
standards for that program would depend on which of those people was going
to take it on.
Most of the time, of course, we don't have a clue what kind of person is
going to take on the program and so we just guess. But even then there are
no absolutes; people are likely basing their guesses on the average
expertise of the people around them where they work, and that varies from
place to place.
--
Peter Scott
Pacific Systems Design Technologies
