!Re: Nuke Redmond!

From: allisonp <allisonp_at_world.std.com>
Date: Sat Apr 8 11:28:51 2000

Richard:

>available and more used in the U.S. than anywhere else. Consequently the
>techniques spread. I doubt programming will ever be freed from the mantle
>of "mystical art" or "right-brain activity" long enough to allow the
>introduction of discipline. I'm beginning to believe that programming is
>more a disease than an engineering discipline. It seems more folks get
into
>it indirectly and almost against their own wishes. Thank goodness that
they
>stick with it long enough to generate the tools we all use and love to
hate.

This is a good point. I write code, lots of it. I'm a hardware person so
I'm
one of those that really do not see myself as programmer save for I'm forced
to! Also while I do see hardware as art (right brain) programming for me is
mostly mechanical/procedural and IDEs drive me nuts for that reason.

On the other hand, in the last 10 years there have been more lines of code
generated the likely the preceeding 20 years and so on. The need to solve
problems does force this forward.

SEANS copy:

>> The project he's on is a complete disaster as the manager went for a
>> Microsoft solution using slews of programs communicating via COM,
>> DCOM, OLE and other alphabet soup of Microsoft technology. A year
>> later and it still doesn't work and my friend has basically told the
>> manager it has to be scrapped and done from scratch, preferably
>> using something other than Microsoft (although my friend might have
>> a slight bias).


Richard:

BTW, your apparent juxtaposition of one word for its homomymn, and it
>happens all too often with this particular one. There's this term,
>pronounced "sloo" which is often misspelled "slew" but which should be
>"slough" also pronounced "sloo" meaning a swamp or quagmire.


To me fyi, SLEW is my word of choice for things that have a delta, IE:
any moving target. MS interfaces are clearly slewed over time.

While it must bother some as misuse, I read it as both usages as
one rather funny pun. It is a quagmire and also there are a rather large
collection of goo all adhering to the mess called Windows. Got any Windex?

The idea of a windowing system, thank xerox parc for that, apple and MS
put it in front of people when hardware to run it got reasonable, it was a
hit.
historically "windowing" was the killer idea just like visicalc and easy to
use databases (dbase) that needed to happen to get a lot of computers
on more than desks of computer savy people.

Allison
Received on Sat Apr 08 2000 - 11:28:51 BST