From: Richard E. <ed...@id...> - 2008-09-05 19:01:24
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see below, please. regards, Richard Erlacher ----- Original Message ----- From: "Dave McGuire" <mc...@ne...> To: <sdc...@li...> Sent: Friday, September 05, 2008 11:46 AM Subject: Re: [Sdcc-user] documentation & open source generally > On Sep 5, 2008, at 1:37 PM, Richard Erlacher wrote: >>> I thought original thought had been made illegal in the USA. >>> >>> But, sad jokes aside, this is excellent advice...and advice that >>> FAR too few people follow. Having recently assumed a somewhat >>> fatherly role to a teenage boy recently (my girlfriend's son), I've >>> learned that "I don't know how!" is the way today's teenagers get out >>> of doing just about anything. Perhaps that attitude is leaking into >>> the adults as well. >>> >>> -Dave >>> >> The point, however, is to document what the software suite is >> SUPPOSED to >> do, and not necessarily what it is OBSERVED to do. That's why it's so >> unfortunate that the doc's weren't written before the first line of >> code, >> rather than as an afterthought. > > That's nice in theory, but in the real world, it just doesn't > work. That you're having such difficulties, and that this thread has > gone on for days, illustrates this fact. > Well, that's just not true. If the doc's had been generated BEFORE the code was started, there'd be clear evidence of what it was intended to do, and of whether it does it. That's one reason programmers don't like spec's to precede programming. If there had been documented spec's, it would be easy to show that their work product doesn't work. The reason it's uncommon in the "real" world, that this highly desirable condition doesn't exist, is that programmers like to do what they like to do, and leave what they don't like to someone else. With no documented specifications, there's no way to show that their work is defective, so they like doing things that way. This points out that management in software development is weak, first because software managers are often former and often incompentent programmers, kicked upstairs because they were in the way, and secondly because they're hopelessly incompentent as managers of software development, possibly both. > > -Dave >> -- > Dave McGuire > Port Charlotte, FL > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------- |