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From: dickey@ssc-vax.UUCP (Frederick J Dickey)
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: software engineering
Message-ID: <1188@ssc-vax.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 15-Apr-87 15:16:22 EST
Article-I.D.: ssc-vax.1188
Posted: Wed Apr 15 15:16:22 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 19-Apr-87 05:33:11 EST
References: <340@ndsuvax.UUCP> <1986@cwruecmp.UUCP> <4428@utah-cs.UUCP> <4429@utah-cs.UUCP>
Organization: Boeing Aerospace Corp., Seattle WA
Lines: 26
Summary: learning by reading code

> 
> When I said "large", I meant something over 100 pages of source.  If the
> students can even *conceive* of writing it themselves, it's not big
> enough.  The idea is that the students will depend on documentation
> and comments and organization to be able to *find* the places to tweak,
> let alone change them.  This of course presupposes a piece of code
> sufficiently well-engineered to unleash on the students...

When I was a student at Ohio State, I took a course whose assignments
involved a brain-damaged assembler. The assignments were to unbrain-damage the
assembler by adding various features. I found out that I could do this without 
having any idea of how the assembler worked. I also had a job for awhile where
I maintained a Fortran compiler. I made several fixes to the compiler without
ever figuring out how it worked. I know that my fixes worked because I was 
where the people who used it could come and shoot me if it didn't. I'm
still alive.

Consider an analogy with reading and writing. Most people can read. That seems
to be a fairly easy skill to pick up. Most people can't write (ever try to
read your average tech report?). Is teaching programming like teaching reading
or teaching writing? I suspect there are a lot of similarities between 
writing and programming. To write something, you have to know what you are
going to say and how you are going to say it. To program something, you
have to know what the program is supposed to do and how to do it.

=======> Fred