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Technology Stocks : OBJECT DESIGN Inc.: Bargain of the year!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mark Finger who wrote (1985)	5/28/1998 10:14:00 AM
From: Sea Otter	Respond to of 3194

Thanks Mark. I agree with all your points. (You, clearly, know what you are talking about). I also agree that many of the best programmers are non CS types, as well as your comments on quality. This is indeed the situation. Just composed a long message to Ahhaha - just because I felt like writing. But I suspect you're right, that very little of it will sink in. Might educate some others, perhaps. On another note, looks like our stock is a dog, eh? Regards, Sea Otter

To: Mark Finger who wrote (1985)	5/29/1998 2:45:00 AM
From: ahhaha	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3194

If you went to Sea Otter and asked for a programming job stating, "First, good programmers write bug free code because they plan and design it that way. They get a lot of the bugs out before the code is written. They have very few bugs to remove and they remove most of them with 'unit tests' before they pass the code on to others and they have stressed the limits. In particular, I consider it a major failing if someone finds a bug in my code.", he'd throw you out of his office. You make an imbecilic comment like this and you say I don't know programming? What do you, write do loops all day? It's possible given you believe in the power of OR. You surely don't know any object languages. If you wrote any C++ or JAVA program of even intermediate (500 lines) length that had the least bit of functionality, there's no way you could write it according to your statement. Unit tests and stress testing? That won't get you a cup of coffee even with a dime. You test code by having users work with it. Then you find why the artificial tests are worse than worthless. If you don't understand that, you'd better stay with the great future in OR. But I see the trick. You pass your perfection on to some other poor sap that has to fix the real world problems. There are few good programmers out there. Correct. No quality. Correct. Other agendas. Correct. So what I see here is you and SO contradicting each other just like the usual corporate hypocritical staff in order to accomplish some self-serving end. It isn't served, but it serves to prove every last claim I made. I received a private message stating, "I agree with what you say though you tend to overstate it. We out-source our code to Indian programmers. We avoid experienced programmers because they don't have good inter-personal skills and avoid college graduates in engineering computer science because they're not productive. We are finding foreign sources aside from India in Malaysia and Israel. We hope we can get Russian help also." I'd say you boys have got some real competition developing. For your information I have 17 years experience programming. I've written in FORTRAN, Assembler, BASIC, C, C++, and JAVA. From 1989 to 1991 I wrote in MSFT's C++ Sys 7. Then I moved to VC++, to JDK and VJ++ IDEs. Starting in 1995 all my work was in J++. I quit active programming 1 year ago, but I still do some support, db, and physics programming for my own research, old clients, and associates. VJ++ 6.0 is my preferred writing environment. I can write extensive programs which I believe after composition are bug-free. It has never been true and side effects, unexpected and unhandled errors, always crop up. You can't design code to handle all contingencies. If you could, the programs would not be of much value because they'd be from the cookie cutter.