>From: fonc-boun...@vpri.org [mailto:fonc-boun...@vpri.org] On Behalf Of David Leibs >Sent: Friday, July 09, 2010 1:33 PM >To: Fundamentals of New Computing >Subject: Re: [fonc] goals > >It isn't that the programmer has little idea of what he is doing. Things just take time to be transformed into an >optimal form.
The programmer must also be given permission to take that time. I can remember only once in 23 years of software development when my employer actually told everyone to stop and clean up the code for 2 weeks. No new features, just make the code better. I was astonished, and very pleased. This sort of thing should be done as a matter of course. Alan and Co. seem to me to be trying to make up for decades of our industry refusing to clean up the code. What is 20 million lines of code can be 20 thousand. If you can apply the 80/20 rule to this in the sense that you can provide people with a lever that does 80 percent of what you need, and if the system is tractable for motivated casual coders so that they can provide the other 20 percent then you have something really valuable. Early home computers provided some of this quality in spite of their shortcomings. The machines and languages were simple enough so that anyone with enough attention span to read a 250 page book could bend the computer to his will. That's a vision of personal computing. I think this idea is lost in our popular culture. -Carl Gundel Psyche Systems
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