On Sat, 28 May 2005 09:47:05 -0700, Tim Douglass
wrote:

On Fri, 27 May 2005 22:11:12 -0700, Mark & Juanita
wrote:

When we transitioned from doing algorithm development in Fortran to C,
one of our more senior alg developers finally acquiesced and decided he
could live with using C when he found the GOTO statement.

Absolutely brilliant algorithm developer, you just didn't want to have to
be the one who had to figure out what his code was doing.

When I was managing programmers I used to get rid of those sorts. No
amount of brilliance was worth the pain down the road. I think C tends
to bring out those kinds more than other languages, but they show up
everywhere. It is that mentality that explains a lot of the garbage
running on our systems now.

As I indicated, this person wasn't a programmer, he was an algorithm
developer. Completely different talent and skillset altogether. While
some good algorithm developers are good programmers, there are fewer good
programmers who are good algorithm designers. Typical development cycle
consists of the algorithm developer developing the concept and testing it
(hence the need for them to be able to do some level of coding),
implementation then follows. Typical implementation is on a different
platform and environment altogether than the proof of concept code.






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If you're gonna be dumb, you better be tough

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