From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,1116ece181be1aea X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2003-09-10 12:09:39 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!logbridge.uoregon.edu!arclight.uoregon.edu!wn13feed!wn11feed!worldnet.att.net!204.127.198.203!attbi_feed3!attbi.com!sccrnsc04.POSTED!not-for-mail Message-ID: <3F5F76EC.8020807@attbi.com> From: "Robert I. Eachus" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20021120 Netscape/7.01 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Is the Writing on the Wall for Ada? References: <3F5CF12A.6060608@attbi.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit NNTP-Posting-Host: 24.34.139.183 X-Complaints-To: abuse@comcast.net X-Trace: sccrnsc04 1063220978 24.34.139.183 (Wed, 10 Sep 2003 19:09:38 GMT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2003 19:09:38 GMT Organization: Comcast Online Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2003 19:09:38 GMT Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:42357 Date: 2003-09-10T19:09:38+00:00 List-Id: Alexander Kopilovitch wrote: > Just for coloring this your statement (which is certainly true) here is a > funny story: an old friend of mine, a true software engineer (despite his > pure mathematical education), who moved to USA 12 years ago and now work for > one of so-called "giants" (which naturally have divisions in India), once wrote > me (I translate from Russian): "Sometimes I receive a mail from one of those > Indians, and after brief reading my first thought is to reply him: guy, first > learn to cut your nails, and only after that try to approach a programming... > but then I recall you, and reread the mail - and discover that the guy is not > so stupid and dirty, in fact he wrote something quite reasonable." Exactly. It is often the case that I will look at an issue brought to the ARG and my software engineering tendancies get in the way. I have to turn that off, and reread everything ignoring style and other cultural values. And this is in Ada, where there is a fairly homogenous programming style. The problem is when you run into managers who are not used to abstract domains, and have to try to explain why a common culture is important to a project. (Again, this has nothing to do, as such, with ethnic background.) I worked on one project where we had a very eclectic group, one person from Nigeria, one from China, a third from England, and a fourth was from Russia. The rest of the team was from America. We all had problems with the Russian that had nothing to do with his background AFAIK. We has rules for checking in software, and he would on a fairly regular basis run the full regression suite on some revision he made, and find a bug. He would then fix the bug and check the software in without re-running the regression suite. This was a serious problem, especially once we had real users for the compiler we were creating. Fortunately the RCS would allow us to back out his changes when the bug fix didn't work or created new problems. The problem was not that he made mistakes, we all did. But that particular repeated mistake on several occasions led to other team members bypassing the RCS and using a "known good" version of the semantic analysis code. -- Robert I. Eachus "As far as I'm concerned, war always means failure." -- Jacques Chirac, President of France "As far as France is concerned, you're right." -- Rush Limbaugh