Re: [BLACKBOX] Niklaus Wirth: Geek of the Week

From: [at]} <Bob>
Date: Mon, 17 Aug 2009 21:29:17 +0100

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> "And as long as companies secretly cherish complexity
> as an effective protection against being copied, there is
> little hope for dramatic improvements of the state of the art."
>
> I've never seen that expressed in public, but I agree,
> it's no accident that we are drowning in complexity.
>
>
> "Besides all the good things, the open source movement
> ignores and actually hinders the perception of one of the
> most important ideas in designing complex systems, namely
> their partitioning in modules, and their formation as an
> orderly hierarchy of modules.... And if the complete source
> is available anyhow, so the story goes, who needs it?"
>
> Ouch.

That somewhat contradicts another of the great Professor's other statements
I have read somewhere (probably in "Project Oberon") that one of the reasons
for poor quality code is that programmers get so few chances to read good
code, which is one reason why published Project Oberon.

Of course, the answer is that people should be able to read the code to
learn good practice, but not take advantage of the secrets revealed, but
stick to the published interface description.

Bob

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Received on Mon Aug 17 2009 - 22:29:17 UTC