> >Derek - We asked for volunteers who felt able to program the rudiments > >of a simple graphics game in three hours.
> Wow, that's a lot of work in a short time. But then programmers always > have unrealistic options of their own ability. So you should end up > with a real programmers ;-) That's a lot of work if written in a bad language with poor libraries using no supporting tools. Using a good IDE, with rich libraries and an expressive programming language, one can do wonders in 4 hours. Of course, the best IDEs are for so-so programming languages, while the great languages have poor IDEs. If one can stand their baroque syntax, Squeak and DrScheme are the only 2 possible exceptions to this. [While I am in academia now, I have written software professionally for 12 years, using roughly 16 different languages, so there is some personal experience behind those statements]. [Though my experience is biased: for a few years, I was lead of a team of 12 programmers, 10 of whom had Math PhDs, so our standards were high...] > > We also sought out software authors > > with substantial shareware work to their name. The 'real' programmers will not be the ones who have written a lot of new code -- seek out those who have been forced to maintain huge pieces of complex software for some years. From what I have seen, an experienced 'maintenance' programmer is more knowledgeable than an experienced new code programmer. > Of course people do get into a rut, so breadth of problems solved via > programming is also important. I would agree with this. So one seeks an experienced programmer who has done maintenance on many different aspects of one or more complex systems, not just one corner of one system for years on end. Dr. Jacques Carette Assistant Professor, Computing and Software McMaster University http://www.cas.mcmaster.ca/~carette ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PPIG Discuss List ([email protected]) Discuss admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/discuss Announce admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/announce PPIG Discuss archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/discuss%40ppig.org/
