Re: Hungarian notation

[andyc@procom.com (Andy Ho-Fan Chan)]

In article <4o07o9$rfu@seagoon.newcastle.edu.au>, peter@tesla.newcastle.edu.au wrote:

>I adopted a policy, years ago, of never agreeing to help
>debug badly-documented code.  When I'm asked questions like
>"why doesn't my code work", my response is along the lines
>of "come back after you've inserted the comments, and we'll
>look at it then".  Half the time they don't come back, 
>because they discover the error themselves while debugging
>the comments.

Well, I guess they just don't want to comment the code and don't come to ask 
you question anymore.  I'm a student in CS, and I know what the students feel. 
 When the project is dued soon and don't get the program works, do you still 
have time to comment to code?

Well, comment is important, but in academic, most of the time no one wants to 
do that.

>A long-standing debate in academic teaching circles is over
>the question of whether one should teach a good programming
>language, or teach the one that's most commonly used.
>Years ago this debate was about COBOL, and in the end most
>CS departments stuck to their guns and dropped COBOL, over
>the protests of most employers, on the grounds that it was
>simply perpetuating bad practice.  Now COBOL is almost a
>non-issue and the focus of the debate has moved to C and C++;
>but this time around the CS departments - most of them,
>anyway - have opted for the morally lazy solution.  Everyone
>seems to have forgotten the message that universities are
>supposed to be looking to the future rather than simply
>trailing the pack.

It's true, but a lot of college are still stuck with Pascal, or Modula.

>Some of my colleagues in another department are still using
>Fortran as their teaching language, based on an "industry
>practice" argument.  Apparently they haven't yet noticed
>that industry practice is moving on and leaving them behind.

Well, there are a lot of "language die-hard" programmers.  We can't do 
anything to them to swtich anyway.


======================== Andy Ho-Fan Chan =========================

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