Re: software engineering and the notion of authorship

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Simon says

  "We have a similar story here, a well known and extremely good assembler =
  programmer wrote a large (>800 line) assembler package with one comment, =
  next to a Jump-If-Equal statement he wrote the single comment "Jump here =
  if not equal" - Wonderful!"


Of course, the fault lies here not with the programmer, but with the
environment and management which allowed this code to be placed into
the system. The programmer should have been forced to write in a reasonable
style or gotten rid of. There is no such thing as an "extremely good
assembler programmer" who would write a package of this size with no
comments. The real fault lies with a manager who did not realize this
and who tolerated such nonsense.