<old fart rant> in my day we had to use punch cards and cut out the little holes by hand with a chisel! and uphill both ways in the snow!!
but i do have a real point to make. i use emacs and no syntax highlighting or most of cperl's features. i do my own indenting and i rarely have a syntax bug i can't find/fix in seconds. the only real feature i use regularly is brace matching/bouncing/skipping. but that isn't the issue. ide's don't help anyone with the real deeper problem which is analysis. this harkens back to the concept of one good expert programmer is better than N junior ones. it comes down to good architecture and design that acheives the current goals and anticipates future ones. i mark something as good architecture when adding signifigant features down the road is a breeze vs a complete rewrite. IDEs can't possibly help with this. so i consider them a minor crutch for those can't type good syntax to begin with and need help there. i don't even consider syntax errors as bugs. i just swat them out and move on. i use print for debugging (even in complex multiprocess systems via log files) as i know where and what to print from experience. setting up a debugger to stop at the right place and only print the right things is much more work IMO. if you lose the session (even if you save it) it isn't the same as having prints where you want them. again, this is from my long personal coding experience and in the punch card days and such that was all you had. so my main point is that coders need to be smarter about their analysis, architecture and design and less caught up in tools like IDE's and syntax highlighting. you can have the greatest IDE in the world and still come up with crappy code and solutions. whereas a good software design can be written and debugged with any set of tools. </old fart rant> on the topic of hiring expert coders vs morons :) i met frank wiles at oscon and he wrote this blog entry: http://blog.revsys.com/2007/08/a-guide-to-hiri.html the comments are mostly interesting but the usual anti-perl crap is there too. in his followup i was plugged! :) http://blog.revsys.com/2007/08/followup-to-a-g.html uri -- Uri Guttman ------ [EMAIL PROTECTED] -------- http://www.stemsystems.com --Perl Consulting, Stem Development, Systems Architecture, Design and Coding- Search or Offer Perl Jobs ---------------------------- http://jobs.perl.org _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
