Re: Per the discussions of Software Engineering


"Joel Kolstad" <JKolstad71HatesSpam@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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"John Larkin" <jjlarkin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
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It ain't an oxymoron if it's true. It's possible to write solid
error-free code, but most programmers aren't interested; they have
other agendas.

One of the contracts we currently have is with a Big Name company
(hundreds of milliions in capitalization, many multi-million dollar
government contracts, that sort of thing), and what does this big company
want us to provide them with on a regular basis?

How many "lines of code" we've written.

Given how utterly meaningless such a metric is these days, with GUI
builders and other code "wizards" "writing" thousands of lines of code for
you, better programmers typically using sibstantially fewer lines of code
to accomplish the same task as beginning programmers -- and more readably
and reliably to boot --, etc., it's not even worth pointing this out to
come and debating it. We just comply and accept their payments...

Said big company uses "pair programming" internally, where two folks sit
side by side and co-author/critique/debug code as it's being written. I'd
tend to agree that, yeah, the result probably is reasonably bug-free, but
I think this result comes at the price of rather low productivity -- IMO a
better solution is to just hire better programmers in the first place.

That sounds like one of the practices of the current (or just past current)
fad
of "Extreme Programming".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_Programming

They define 12 practices from Extreme Programming at the end, one of which
is "Pair Programming":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_Programming

All of flavor of the main fad currently in Programming of "Agile Methods":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development

<shrug>

Sounds good but Devil/details/etc.

Robert


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