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OT: Crazy Programming

Paul Boddie paul at boddie.net
Mon May 13 13:56:16 EDT 2002 
"Andrew Dalke" <dalke at dalkescientific.com> wrote in message news:<abnqdd$8bf$1 at slb0.atl.mindspring.net>...
> 
> Since Perl people like the analogy to human languages, it's like me
> saying I drink 'soda's while people in the Midwest drink 'pop'.

This is one thing I strongly dislike about the "Perl attitude" to
programming, along with the "coding is an art not a science" viewpoint
and the "code is poetry" school of thought. Programming and coding are
(or should mostly be) sciences or engineering practices which we
should strive to get right every time - programmers and developers
are, after all, writing instructions for machines which pretty much
have to do the right thing all the time, not just when it's "cool" to
do so (or not to do so).

Certainly, the number of situations where poetry-as-code is acceptable
should be much fewer than seems to be the case today, and I'm not just
referring to situations where Very Expensive Spacecraft must avoid
just dropping into the ocean because it "felt like it". Even in "home
computing", people get frustrated when programs crash, leading to bad
experiences and a negative impression of a technology that should be
beneficial. Newcomers to computing must sometimes wonder what the
profession has been up to for the last 50 years...

Paul
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