Re: Exception Handling

[Rick Decker <rdecker@hamilton.edu>]

Paul A. Houle wrote:
> 
> Don't sweat it.  People on newsgroups treat each other like
> garbage.  This is because we can.  If people talked trash to each
> other the way that we do on USENET,  we'd see visual nonverbal
> signals of agression 

[like a punch in the mouth, f'r example]

>that would make us feel to distressed to
> continue.
> 
>         When the people on the other end of the connection are
> nothing more than a bit of badly written,  and these days,  badly
> formatted,  text sometimes you get to feel that people should get
> the death penalty for stupid posts,  unsolicited commerical spam
> and such.

Quite right.  One makes allowances for newbie behavior in the hope
that with time will come an understanding of, say, newsgroup netiquette.
What I find far more distressing is having to listen to people
who, after months and perhaps years, never manage to infer the rules
governing polite behavior.  Oh well, that's what killfiles are for, but
it's still regrettable.
> 
>         Another issue is that computer people are not good about
> attribution.  To take an example,  it seems clear that the advances
> in compiler technology from,  say,  the mid 60's to the mid 80's
> sprang from the lingustic discoveries of Noam Chomsky.  Most of the
> people who use the technology don't care.  In fact,  even CS
> academics don't talk about it much,  probably because they
> associate Noam Chomsky with the student protests of the 1960's
> and opposition to the Vietnam war.

Oh, golly.  Now I have to disagree.  First, for someone to choose 
deliberately to ignore Chomsky for his activities against the war would 
require (1) that these activities were known, which would likely mean 
the person would have to be at least as venerable as I am and (2) 
that the person would even find such behavior reprehensible in the first 
place.  No, I'd suggest that the liklier reasons would be that,
first, Chomsky's stuff is somewhat intimidating for a non-specialist, 
and, second, that there are quite a few derivative sources in CS 
literature that put transformational grammars and language hierarchies
in a much more familiar context.  I just did a quick scan of my 
bookshelves and of the sixteen books I have on theory and formal 
languages all sixteen mention Chomsky prominently.  I got bored before I 
finished my compiler texts, but at least the Dragon Book and Son of 
Dragon both contain citations of Chomsky.  Doesn't sound to me that 
he's *that* seriously ignored.
> 
>         I get the impression that people learn programming from
> copying other people's code.

I don't have a problem with that.  My guess is that if you were to ask
a collection of programmers how they learned that particular skill, a 
large fraction would admit to having spent a lot of time looking at the 
code other people produced.  After all, isn't that the way we all 
learned our first (and subsequent) natural language?  So why should 
learning a programming language be that much different?

>If book publishers were honest about
> it,  they'd write a book titled "Learn to Cut and Paste Java in
> 21 Hours!" 

If the title were a truthful statement of the contents, I'd buy it
in a second.  Even better, if I thought it could be done, I'd write
it myself and retire early.  Unfortunately, it's a hopeless task.  Even 
if you used a modern app builder, where the cutting and pasting is done 
by the program, no collection of canned code could possibly cover all 
the apps we would want to write.  The inevitable conclusion is that
no matter how many code exemplars we have available, we still have 
to know enough to wrap them up in a robust, correct program, which
is very good news for those of us in the ed biz.  That said, I'll
still reiterate my point that while on the road to learning how to 
program, examples can be very useful.

>People are more concerned with getting a program
> working fast than they are on attributing the source.

Good.  I get to end on a note of agreement, sort of.  I agree that
the general standards of citation could use some work.  The rules
differ slightly between real world programs and the sort of toy
programs students write, but not by much.  Getting a program working 
fast is a good thing.  Understanding what you're doing is even better,
and acknowledging publicly where the borrowed chunks came from is even 
better.


Regards,

Rick

-----------------------------------------------------
Rick Decker                   rdecker@hamilton.edu
Department of Comp. Sci.      315-859-4785
Hamilton College
Clinton, NY  13323            =  !=  ==  (!)
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