On Fri, 27 Apr 2007 17:57:12 +0000, john gilmore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>Dean Kent writes: >> >>The human mind has a limited capacity for organizing information >>into something meaningful. ... >... >Views like his are common, but they are also curiously parochial. >Someone who wants to do physics is expected to master the >necessary techniques, and >if he cannot it is politely but firmly made clear to him that he must do >something else. >... I seem to have lost the beginning of this sub-thread, but I think the whole argument is bogus. Programming is closer to engineering than to physics, and maintainability of the product is as (or more) important that the basic principles behind those products. And (from from earlier in this thread), it is very rare for a carpenter to have to understand the internal workings of his tools well enough to rebuild them to fulfill a new purpose. No matter the capacity of the human minds involved, those future involved minds are going to have better thing to do than understand the workings of earlier minds. There is nothing parochial about making trying to make a program easily understandable. No matter how well a programmer has mastered the necessary techniques of programming, he/she can still be baffled by a previous programmer's "clever" coding. And anybody writing a program today must assume it will have to be understood and modified by some other programmer in the future. If the program can be done efficiently only by clever programming (and if that efficiency is really needed) then the clever programming needs to be accompanied by VERY clear documentation. If new, more complex instructions can actually simplify the programming logic then I think they should be readily used, otherwise they should be used with care (and lots of documentation). Pat O'Keefe ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
