Re: Hungarian notation

[ok@goanna.cs.rmit.EDU.AU (Richard A. O'Keefe)]

jmartin@cs.ucla.edu (Jay Martin) writes:

>ok@goanna.cs.rmit.EDU.AU (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:

>>Frankly, I have come to the end of my tether.
>>I am *sick* of programs that don't work.
>>I am *sick* of operating systems that crash.
>>I am *sick* of word processors that hang my machine.
>>I am *sick* of hypercomplex interfaces with pathetic documentation.
>>I am *sick* of file transfer programs that scramble student files.
>>I am *sick* of oh well you get the idea.

>>I am nearly as fed up with Apple as I am with Micro$oft.

>>I want to learn from the people who routinely produce programs that work.

>If you think virtually anyone in academic Computer Science really
>gives a rats ass about the above (software design and implementation),
>boy are you in the wrong field!

When it first came on the stage, RMIT was "The Melbourne Working Men's
College".  Nowadays it is a fully fledged university, but the basic
ethos is still "we are here to educate people to be effective at their
job".  Tertiary education here is divided (to grossly over-simplify)
into "the TAFE sector" (training) and "the HECS sector" (education).
In this department, we try to provide *education*, not (or not just)
*training*.  (There is also an RMIT TAFE division which provides
training.)  But it is supposed to be education that will actually help
people do a better job.

We have a long way to go.  Teaching is *extremely* hard.  But we try.
Our graduates have a pretty good chance of getting a job in the field
they studied.  The Federal government here is talking about 10-12%
cuts to higher education next year.  You can bet your bottom dollar
that we care *passionately* about the reputation our graduates earn
for us.  And so we care passionately about trying to teach them how
to work well in a real programming environment.

In my "home" university, the University of Auckland in New Zealand,
I know that the staff in the CS department there, like here, care about
research, but also care deeply that their students actually have a
reasonable level of competence.  And for what it's worth, I know that
my friends at the University of Melbourne also care about this.

In an environment where doctrinaire economic irrationalists play
Sweeney Todd, where more students go looking for jobs after their
first degree than continue with further study, and where you have
only to read comp.risks or Software Engineering Notes to see how
much suffering is caused by bad programs, any CS academic has to
care passionately about software design and implementation.  If
we don't, then we will soon have to look for new jobs, and who then
will want us?

In an environment where native speakers of English are not only not
taught to spell, but can enter university not knowing the difference
between "as such" and "such as", and writing sentences like "I would
suggest consulting to a good book", our ability to teach students to
write good comments is obviously limited.

Anyone who actually has to *mark* student programs wants them to write
well, with appropriate comments.

If there is anyone at all in academic computer science who doesn't
care about software design and implementation, perhaps there may be
a few people with established reputations who don't come into contact
with many undergraduate students and don't actually use computers much
themselves.

Mind you, there are people who *care* who don't know what good code *is*.
I've just been looking at a C textbook where the authors go out of their
way to tell their readers to use names like "quarter_t", which names are
of course reserved in ANSI C.  At least they thought about naming, even
if they know little about ANSI C.

-- 
Fifty years of programming language research, and we end up with C++ ???
Richard A. O'Keefe; http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/~ok; RMIT Comp.Sci.