On 13 May 2014 13:31, John Cremona <[email protected]> wrote: > Many contributors to Sage have only had experience of writing code for > them,selves before, and there is a lot to learn about in the different world > of open source sofware where you cannot assume that the person running your > code has a PhD in the area.... > > John
I have suggested in the past that William buy copies of some books on the subject of "software engineering" for regular developers. I am fairly sure it is something he could justify. But to the best of my knowledge he has not done it. There would need to be at least 3 criteria for issuing a free book 1) The person is a regular developer. 2) The person would agree to spend some time reading it 3) They agree to keep it, and not just sell it on eBay. I recall one Australian post-doc who came to work at UCL and was going to implement a major piece of software to be used by others. The software was to control an optical spectrometer he was developing. His first degree was probably physics or electronics - certainly not computer science or anything related to it. He realized that implementing a major piece of software that would be used by others was new territory for him. I recall him saying that rather than "flying by the seat of his pants" he would learn how to develop the software properly. He then purchased a book on software engineering on the grant. It was then put on our book shelf, and I started to read it. It certainly made me think about software development in a different way to I had done previously. BTW, for an amusing, but true example of how not to develop software, I can tell you a story about a PhD student at UCL. She never used a debugger, and was really struggling with her code, so I offered to look at it and try to help her. I then realized all here variable names were Disney characters or similar. The the variably for the absoprtion coefficient might have been "Micky_Mouse", "Snow_White" or similar!!! Dr. David Kirkby G8WRB http://www.vnacalibration.co.uk/ Economical & accurate VNA calibration kits. Coefficients available for HP, Agilent, Anritsu, Rohde & Schwarz and VNWA network analyzers. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
