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On Sat, 20 May 2006, Bob Walkden wrote:
> This is one of the main routes into commercial IT & software development for
> people who do not have a computing degree. I do not have a computing degree.
> My education was in modern languages and linguistics, and I never expected
> ever to use a computer. This was the 1970s. However, after a period of
> unemployment the UK government trained me in COBOL. I was specifically
> trained to be a commercial programmer writing commercial software, not a
> computer scientist. I was very lucky in that my teacher, going against the
> grain, taught me structured programming and introduced me to a Pascal-like
> notation which gave me an insight into the wider world, which I have pursued
> ever since.
Thank you for sharing your story.
> But the fact remains that people are specifically trained to be
> commercial programmers, not to be computer scientists.
The distinction between "commercial programmers" and "computer scientists"
explains a few things. First, OMS seem to have the "computer scientist"
background, and therefore BB has this c.s. flavor. The path from BB to
research-oriented Oberon Systems and/or Zonnon seems to be short. The path
from BB to commercially-oriented M$ packages seems to be long. That is
how I would summarize our recent discussion about the BB GUI that is
lacking the Visual Studio goodies.
Second, I now better understand the chasm between my research-oriented
BB applications and the local programmers in my own lab. They all came
from industry (Xerox, Kodak, etc.) and they seem to not understand the
crucial features of my BB programs. I was puzzled by the fact that
a team of five professional programmers working for almost a year still
cannot reproduce tangible results that my BB apps produced after one
person working for two months. Now I can better appreciate the
difficulties that "commercial programmers" are facing when confronted
with scientific problems. They were trained to be foot soldiers like
you described. Somewhat amazingly, these professionals have entrenched
themselves in their own programming world inside the lab. They seem
almost helpless when asked to research and implement a simple algorithm,
like for example an image transformation or signal averaging. They
immediately stiffen up and insist on having "requirements". It creates
problems. Science does not work that way.
At first I though that C++ was the culprit. The said professionals are
very proud of using C++, and their work is of course much more
complicated that it needs to be. But after this discussion I start
seeing the problem lies deeper in the training background of "commercial
programmers". They were not trained to do research and then make
their own choices. They were trained to follow requirements. So these
guys are having troubles in an alien world of science. Too bad for them,
and also too bad for the lab.
Thank you for making the "grubby world" more comprehensible to me.
W.
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Received on Sun May 21 2006 - 19:40:17 UTC