Comments on: Another reason for licensing programmers

By: Tweets that mention Another reason for licensing programmers | Steve Freeman -- Topsy.com

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 00:12:48 +0000

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by SteveF , Philip Schwarz. Philip Schwarz said: RT @sf105 Nice to see the Stuart Wray's paper published. I wrote up his comparison of coding to gambling a while ago http://bit.ly/4xajAK [...]

By: O. B. Server

O. B. Server — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 21:05:47 +0000

re: “Instead of taking a step back and learn and understand the underlying technology or conceptual model we go on trying things and hope that the things we try will fix the problem.”

That’s bang-on.

The “continual hope that the next fix will be the right one”, etc. Sounds like a classic case of not understanding the problem. (Easier said than remedied, alas.)

I know the feeling only too well, as in the early 1990’s I had the extreme pleasure of maintaining ICL’s OfficePower after way too many fingers had been in the pie, so to speak. (Offending bits re-written, hopefully, in the intervening years.)

By: e

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 07:51:11 +0000

Thanks for bringing up this concept of “Variable Ratio”. I’ve seen this a lot in myself and others. Instead of taking a step back and learn and understand the underlying technology or conceptual model we go on trying things and hope that the things we try will fix the problem.

Examples:
Instead of having a whole understanding of how css works the developer tweaks a little bit in one browser to only discover that it doesn’t work in another.

Without reading the documentation and without looking at the source code to understand the inner work of a library, we try to use the library and make changes after changes with the hope that it will work.