Ha, Ha ... At my age, every day is good if you just wake up! But I do try to keep my curmudgeonly reputation intact when I can.
But seriously, good coders, in spite of what you may read, are not necessarily good designers; this is and has always been true of virtually any profession. A good carpenter, for instance, may do a fantastic job of constructing someone else's designs, but produce second-rate stuff strictly on his own. A great cabinet designer might not even know how to create a dovetail. Or not ... It varies widely and I can't see how anyone can show a valid correlation. And "stable" is, after all, merely one aspect on which most companies and users evaluate software: it's necessary, but insufficient as they say. Coding is a profession requiring study and experience; a programmer might also be a decent accountant, or writer, or cook, or whatever, but is usually at the mercy of those doing the specifications and explanations when attempting to automate something he's only been recently exposed to - what's even more difficult to do in an unfamiliar coding exercise is knowing when it is appropriate for "software" to tackle a task in an entirely different manner than a human would (compare, for instance, the most efficient ways for a human to sort a pile of records to the most efficient way for a machine to sort electronic versions of those same records). Not all good coders have enough experience to do this successfully. If you take a look at the documents I referred to, you'll see what I mean: almost everything can be made to work in the multi-lingual examples I give, and I would guess that the actual code has probably been cleaned up in all the recent reviews, but it's still a royal pain to use for multi-lingual documents. In short, it's a bad, user-hostile design that was coded well. How many great coders are familiar with more than one or two languages? (Quite a few actually, but I'm guessing you get my point anyway). And, as I said, I agree with you that Mendelson's comments seemed very odd given the circumstances. Perhaps I should contact him and see if he wants to join us in this discussion. -- View this message in context: http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/PC-Magazine-Comments-about-LibreOffice-tp4165317p4165460.html Sent from the Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com. -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: [email protected] Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
