Re: Coding Standards

[frank@bigdog.engr.arizona.edu (Frank Manning)]

In article <Ds4yqn.667@world.std.com> bobduff@world.std.com (Robert A Duff)
wrote:

> In article <31AABC53.1080@lmtas.lmco.com>,
> Ken Garlington  <garlingtonke@lmtas.lmco.com> wrote:
>> Funny you should mention this. We have a lot of non-programmers that read
>> (but do not modify) our Ada code.
>
> That probably explains our differences of opinion.  I have never been in
> a situation where it was important for non-programmers to understand
> code -- if non-programmers need to understand something, I've always had
> to write it in plain English.  
>    [...]

I can sympathize with both positions. On one hand, non-programmers might
benefit by getting a look under the hood (er, bonnet?). On the other hand,
they would also benefit from a translation to plain English.

This reminds me of a tongue-in-cheek article I posted in September '94
where I had ideas on selling Ada to management, if you're unfortunate
enough to have management populated by control freaks. These are the guys
who, if they know any programming at all, tend to be in love with
QuickBASIC. The idea was you can point out how much easier it is to read
Ada compared to C/C++, and you can appeal to their suspicions that
programming jargon was invented by hackers to exclude everybody else
from the True Brotherhood. I also wrote:

  "We might find allies in coworkers who are non-programmers. They
   already know how dependent their project is on the success of the
   software. They also know how important communication is. Ask them
   if they would like to be able to at least read the source code if
   they wanted to. Show them the two pages of Ada and C code.

  "Ask them if they really want workers to be divided into two
   classes -- the cognoscenti, who are the only ones who can even
   come close to reading the 'code,' and the rest of us. Ada can be
   at least vaguely readable by a non-programmer. C/C++ is
   completely opaque to a non-programmer."

When I wrote this, I was more negative toward C than I am today. I kind
of like the language now, although I like Ada more.

Anyway, the point is that communication is important whenever you have
groups of people trying to work together. Anything that gets in the way
of communication should generally be avoided. Unless you want to end up
like Dilbert.

-- Frank Manning