On 2/14/2016 2:11 PM, rbowman wrote:
On 02/14/2016 01:08 PM, Sam E wrote:

That reminds me of something I heard once:

A company has 2 employees to produce an employee newsletter. They get a
machine that allows the newsletter to be produced in half the time. What
do they do:

A) Allow both employees to go home in the middle of the day, and
continue to pay them the same (since they're getting the same amount of
work done).

B) Fire one or the employees.

C) Require a more complex newsletter, so it still takes them both all
day to do it.

I'm a sucker for museums do I can't remember which one it was, possibly the
Ford. Anyway, it followed household appliances through the years. They noted as
labor saving devices were introduced women found more complicated things to
fill their days with.

Yes. The number of hours spent on "housework" has remained constant;
regardless of the number (and cost!) of "labor saving" devices introduced.

Tasks that were not considered part of "normal" housework crept
into the list (when floors were made of dirt, I don't imagine
they got washed AND waxed often! : ). And, still other "labor
saving" devices just altered the character of the labor but didn't
really "save" any.

E.g., we have a honking big "juicer" that we use for our citrus.
Definitely a labor saver -- in terms of elbow grease. *But*,
it needs to be cleaned after use -- as the pulp gets trapped in
the places that are *supposed* to trap it, you can't just drop it
in a dishwasher but, instead, need to clean it by hand. And, if you
don't want the stainless to spot, it must be dried by hand. Then,
reassembled and stored.

Of course, it also clogs *while* juicing. So, you must disassemble it
and do a cursory cleaning frequently. And, shut down the motor while
you're doing that -- which means waiting for it to spin up, again,
later.

I've certainly seen it in my career from those unreadable reports printed on
green bar paper to the latest dashboard with burn down graphs, pie charts, and
so forth. I haven't noticed management getting more productive but the managers
certainly have more toys to keep them busy.

Look at how long it takes to write a simple memo! And, how many times
it gets *printed* (proofs) before it gets distributed -- in our
PAPERLESS offices! Do you see better grammar in those? Or, fewer
typographical errors? I.e., isn't that what all those composition
tools are *supposed* to address??

Closer to home: look at the advances in 4G languages (compared to
earlier purely procedural languages). All the mechanisms that are
supposed to make it easier to write *better* ("more correct")
programs. Yet, programmer productivity remains astonishingly low
and code quality equally poor. The only thing that has "improved"
is the size of executables (if you consider "getting bigger" to be
an improvement : )!

So, based on personal experience, I'll go with C.