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From: lws@comm.WANG.COM (Lyle Seaman)
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: Software Engineering/Group Projects
Message-ID: <1990Mar20.232740.12769@comm.WANG.COM>
Date: 20 Mar 90 23:27:40 GMT
References: <1175@dftsrv.gsfc.nasa.gov> <210@samna.UUCP> <4949e7d2.20b6d@apollo.HP.COM>
Organization: Wang Labs, Platform Comms.
Lines: 46

perry@apollo.HP.COM (Jim Perry) writes:
>they'll follow them if the grade is on the line.  The understanding
>behind the rituals may not come until later.  One problem in an
>undergraduate environment may be finding graders who understand the
>deeper truth, and can reasonably judge compliance.

Perhaps.  In my case, I was one of these graders, and after several
years of 'industry experience' [what a losing requirement for a job!]
I honestly believe that I _did_ understand, and could reasonably judge.

On the other hand, after several years of industry experience, I have
rarely seen code which conforms to the level of design and documentation
which I required of students completing CS1. (And uniformly _got_,
with _no_ exceptions.  A great bunch of students. I hope they read this.)

>One eye-opening experience is the first time you are called upon to
>make an enhancement to a significant program that doesn't follow these
>"aribtrary" rules, for instance is well-designed and structured, but
>completely undocumented.  I agree with the original poster, that the
>effect is significantly enhanced when it is one's own code (and one's
>own code, a year or two old, may as well be that of a stranger).

Yes but:  Having worked with both, I'd far sooner inherit code
that is well-designed and structured, hopefully with mnemonic
names, but without documention, than vice versa.  Unfortunately,
you almost always get poorly designed programs with no documentation.

>A pet peeve of mine is the observation that while textual coding style
>seems to be well-established, i.e. CS programs seem to be producing
>programmers who consistently indent their code and generally adhere to
>consistent conventions (to the point of religious fervor, probably due
>to the sort of ritual enforcement I mentioned), there is very little
>consistency (or general presense) of documentation.  It's probably
>easier to enforce and motivate indentation, and I'm all for it, but
>you can always mechanically reformat a program; there's no way you can
>deduce what it's intended to do (as opposed, for instance, to what
>it does :-).

Amen.  I had the interesting experience, that as a freshman in a CS major,
we were not allowed to use the Pascal beautifier, but were forced to 
meticulously line up our BEGINS and ENDs and our THENs and ELSEs, 
in a manner akin to preparation for a military inspection.  Sadism.
 
-- 
Lyle                     sendmail.cf under construction, pardon the From:
lws@comm.wang.com        (or, uunet!comm.wang.com!lws)  (508) 967-2322