"Tim Douglass" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 31 May 2005 11:09:59 -0000,
(Robert Bonomi) wrote:

When I moved to managing programmers I came to loathe those who wrote
"clever" algorithms. My ability to read and understand code was well
above average and anything I couldn't figure out in a reasonable
length of time with the included comments was rejected. Those who
persisted in producing those things found employment elsewhere. My
experience has been that the more clever the algorithm the more likely
it is to cause problems a couple years down the road. A good example
is undocumented truth-table algorithms - which were a favorite with
*my* boss when he wrote code (which I inherited). It wasn't hard at
all to lose a week or more just trying to add one option. As hardware
speeds increased I dumped the elegant in favor of brute force that
could be easily understood and maintained.


I wasn't in the software end of the business, but 27yr. with NCR Corp. as
large scale system tech. produced a lot of funnies. First one was an
insurance company, program running solid for about 3yr. suddenly starts
blowing up, always at the same address. Turned out it was a situation which
original programmer knew could occur, but had never debugged!

--
Nahmie
The greatest headaches are those we cause ourselves.