Re: OT More pens (was Re: Phoneme winnowing continues)

> > ::pet peeve:: As a programmer/analyst, I am immensely tired of todays
> > point&click programmers who have no idea of the wasted overhead and bad
> > code
> > they generate when they let the interpreter/compiler generate the real
> > code.
>
>As a matter of prejudice, I tend to agree with you.  But rationally,
>I know that assembly-language application programmers sang the exact
>same tune when they saw whippersnappers coding in Fortran and Lisp and
>Cobol.
And not unjustifiably so - assembly language does enable one to write very
tight code (how else can one write a 2 byte infinite loop? :) ). The move to
higher-level languages was a tradeoff - efficiency versus maintainability
(though some C code is contrary to the latter).

And I was amused when C and C++ began making the very same complaints about
VB and JAVA that COBOL programmers made about C and C++.

My issue with point&click programmers is that they too often make bad
choices because they no longer know the internals of what they are doing. 6
months ago was interfacing with the advanced programming staff, for a 3rd
party widely available app, who had no idea what was involved in porting
data to/from their app nor any idea how their RI mapped across their UDB.
Turned out they had switched off all the auto RI in the DB and had coded it
within the app using other tables to drive the RI. Talk about a mess....

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