Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ncrlnk!ncr-sd!hp-sdd!hplabs!hpda!hpcuhc!hpsemc!gph
From: gph@hpsemc.HP.COM (Paul Houtz)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Piles of plusses (was Re: comma operator:  keep away?)
Message-ID: <810044@hpsemc.HP.COM>
Date: 26 Apr 89 16:07:33 GMT
References: <4325@omepd.UUCP>
Organization: HP Technology Access Center, Cupertino, CA
Lines: 52

crewman@bucsb.UUCP (JJS) writes:
In a business which so sorely "needs professionals", why are we bending over 
backwards to make our programs easier to read for amateurs?


   Henry, you were honest enough to state your opinion (and brave,too),
so I won't flame you for it.  I will as you a question, though:

   You state that the business needs professionals.  How is making your
code less readable going to help produce more professionals?

   An "amateur" is someone who does a job for fun and does not get paid.
 
   A professional is someone who gets paid to do a job.   A professional
basketball player gets paid to play basketball.

   Now, there is another context to professionalism.  A professional is 
supposedly someone with more responsibility and pride in their work than
a non-professional.

   Most architects work that I have seen is so clearly produced that even
a non-architect can understand their output.   I think this is a noble
goal for a programmer.

   As an employer, I would consider an engineer or programmer who takes 
pride in the readability of his code to be a "professional".  I really
don't think that elegance is as important for it's own sake.  If a routine
needs to be short (like microcode) and it needs to be fast, then that is
part of the task.

   Now, as far as your opinion about what features to use and what not
to use, I agree with you.  C should not look like Pascal.   If an employer
wants C programs to look like Pascal, then he should have is programmers
write in Pascal.   I don't see anything wrong with using most of the 
availiable syntax of C, although you must admit that there are certain 
constructs in many languages that should be avoided, e.g., "goto" type
statements should be used as a last resort.

   I will make a further argument in favor of the proposition that any
feature available in a language should be fair game:

   In COBOL, there is a feature called the ALTER statment that alters
the destination of all GO TO statements in a program.  This is the sickest
feature I have ever seen in a language, and has finally be removed from
the COBOL 85 standard.

   In FORTRAN it is STILL allowed to use variables that have not been 
declared.   This is a practise that should be eliminated from all serious
programming languages, due to the ease with which bugs can be created.
In fact, there is a famous story about a multi-million dollar space 
vehicle that went off into the universe due to a bug created by this 
feature