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From: warren@teltone.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.ai
Subject: Re: Stolfo's call for discussion
Message-ID: <252@teltone.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 11-Apr-84 23:13:01 EST
Article-I.D.: teltone.252
Posted: Wed Apr 11 23:13:01 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 13-Apr-84 01:54:16 EST
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	Unexpectedness and lack of pre-specification occur in many professional
	programming environments.  In AI particulary it occurs because
	experimentation reveals unexpected results, as in all science. 

	In hardware (device-driver) code it occurs because the specs lie or
	omit important details, or because you make an "alternative
	interpretation".

	In over-organized environments, where all the details are spelled out
	to the nth degree in a stack of documents 8 feet high, unexpectedness
	comes when you read the spec and discover the author was a complete idiot
	having a very bad day.  I have seen alleged specs that were signed off
	by all kinds of high mucky-mucks that are completely, totally, zonkers.
	Not just in error, but complete jibberish, having no visible association
	with either reality or thought, not to mention the project at hand.
	At the very least, they are simply out of date.  Something crucial has
	changed since the specs were written.

	In business environments, it occurs when the president of the company
	says he just changed the way records are to be kept, and besides, doesn't
	like the looks of the reports he agreed to several months ago.  Whats a
	programmer to do ?  Tell the boss to shove it ?  The single most difficult
	kind of programming occurs when  1) The user is your boss (or "has power").
	2) The user is fairly stupid.  3) The user/boss is good enough of a con
	artist to prevent the programmer from leaving.  It is admitted, however,
	that the difficulty is not technical, per se, but political.

	All the above examples are from my professional experience, which spans
	over ten years.  None of the situations are very unusual.  Unexpectedness
	is part of our job.  In any case, 90 to 99% of the code in the AI systems
	I've seen are much like any other program.  There are parsers, allocators,
	symbol tables, error messages, and so on.  I'll let others testify to
	the remainder of the code, its been a while.
					
					warren