Plea for help: The detriment of using Microsoft products

[ccb at valinux.com]

Mike Bilow asserts:
>   Ultimately, reviewing code is a lot like teaching.

This is a fundamental truth.  Without this teaching, your
organization's code degenerates into mystical bullshit.

If I had a dollar for every software engineering manager I've met that
lacked this basic understanding...

Being able to reason about code out loud with others is in my opinion
the core of the art.  If, for a particular piece of code, this process
of reasoning out loud did not start early in the design process and
continue well into the code's maturity, there is high likelyhood of
substantial bit-rot.

Like it or not, programming is still an oral (aural) culture.  Code
review is like the paleolithic campfire where the tales of the ancestors
are deftly drilled into the minds of the young.

Ironically, there are a number of books from Microsoft Press that are
very clear on some of these issues:

     Writing Solid Code, Steve Maguire
     Code Complete, Steve McConnell
     Debugging the Development Process, Steve Maguire

There is another classic by Tom Demarco and Timothy Lister called
"Peopleware" that points out that the best software engineering
organizations are better than that worst by A FACTOR OF TEN and that
your productivity as a programmer is more highly corelated to the
organization you currently work in more than anything else.  Cultural
factors, such as whether you get to participate in code reviews make
up part of this.  The other part is stuff that's easy to fix like
sabotaging the paging system and having at least 72 sqft of office
space WITH A DOOR.

I hate Microsoft because the API's they expose to developers indicate
that they're either deliberately messing with us or they've got lead
in the Redmond water supply.

Now back to your regularly scheduled anti-MS thrash fest...

ccb (shaman, retired)


--
Charles C. Bennett, Jr.			VA Linux Systems
Systems Engineer,			25 Burlington Mall Rd., Suite 300
US Northeast Region			Burlington, MA 01803-4145
+1 617 543-6513				+1 888-LINUX-4U
ccb at valinux.com				www.valinux.com
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