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From: eggert@twinsun.com (Paul Eggert)
Subject: Re: software engineering and the notion of authorship
Date: 1996/07/11
Message-ID: <4s38kf$mk6@der.twinsun.com>#1/1
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references: <nh3f3pppsl.fsf@paralysys> <4quk22$78@krusty.irvine.com>
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organization: Twin Sun Inc, El Segundo, CA, USA
newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.c++,comp.software-eng
Date: 1996-07-11T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


ok@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:

> I had to maintain a large chunk of code which had only one comment ...
> and a lot of one or two letter identifiers.  And code reviews were not
> a political practicality with that piece of code:
> it had been written by the _founder_ of the company before I joined.
> And he had left.

I had to maintain a similar batch of code, and if I'm not mistaken it
was written by the same guy for his previous company.  It was a joy.
That guy really knew what he was doing, and his code taught me a lot of things.

But I had to write documentation describing the program so that
everybody else at our company could follow what was going on.
The documentation was considerably longer than the program that it described.

In extreme cases like this, the usual software engineering management
principles often don't work well.  And extreme cases are often the
most profitable ones....