On Thu, 23 Apr 2009 20:32:30 +0000, Ted MacNEIL <[email protected]> wrote:
>>IMO, most shops today fear any and all programmers who could be considered >"above average", regardless of the language that they use. Why? Because their code will be harder to understand than the simple code written by less talented. > >I TOTALLY disagree with that statement! >I've found that the most talented write the cleanest, most elegant, and easiest to maintain code. >They are smart/skilled enough to not use the obscure constructs. > > >>That means that the code is more difficult, and thus expensive, to maintain. > >I find the weak programmers are the ones to use strange (and often misunderstood) tricks, or as we used to call it 'spaghetti code'. > >Writing hard to maintain code is produced by poor programmers, not strong ones. > >- >Too busy driving to stop for gas! I agree and disagree with you. But, perhaps, it is due to what I have seen written around here. Take a case in point. A programmer has two VSAM KSDS files. He is reading one file sequentially and wants to see in the second file has as associated record in it (both files are keyed identically). How to do that? I will grant that in the past, this was a "no brainer". However, this "normal" (perhaps sub-normal?) programmer did it the "easy" way. He read the first file sequentially. Then, for each record read, he did a keyed read of the second file. The second file contained about 5% of the number of records in the first file. So 95% of the time, the keyed read got a "record not found" and, as a plus, ended up with its buffers flushed and positioning lost. Of course the correct way to do this is to read each file sequentially in parallel (they are in the same order due to using the "same" key values), doing a "match merge" type operation. But that mindset seems, at least around here, to have disappeared. I did the "match merge" code to show how to do it (with a dramatic reduction in CPU and elapsed time). The programmer considered __that__ to be "too advanced" and "obscure". Perhaps that shows what __I__ now consider to be "normal". It may well be "sub normal" in the rest of the world. -- John ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
