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<preaching>
there's money in selling 'complex things can be done by untrained people
with tool X'
microsoft has made a fortune from convincing receptionists who couldn't
pass school leaving they could be publishers - overbloated word douments
for newsletters is one of the most crippling things our mail server has
to cope with; oracle from convincing managers they can be database
administrators; and linux has made a whole world of programming
available to the same audience.
the hard part of programming is the maths....
how can you build business rules if you don't understand algebra at
least and a fair competence at calculus, not to mention linear
programming? come to think of it, how can you use a spreadsheet for more
than adding columns?
how can you build a large multi processor, multi-location processing
system if you can't work with black boxes and predicate calculus.
beats me. but megadollar projects start and fail all the time because
we've devalued these skills in the computing world. try getting a job
designing bridges without an engineering degree, and yet most
programming is far more complex and often as life critical.
to paraphrase a recent us president - it's the maths stupid
couple of simple rules: if 90% effort goes into the user interface
chances are you won't recognise failure until it's way too late. if the
depth of a tree is more than 5, most people (programmers included) will
not manipulate it correctly - this applies as much to databases as
documents.
unfortunately xml will go the same way - it's not for end users, but
it's a great tool for trained professional programmers and analysts. and
it's a great place for silver bullet promises and to make money from
those promises.
don't get me wrong - it's the future, if we don't get derailed.
</preaching>
On Fri, 2003-12-19 at 03:35, Alaric B Snell wrote:
> Jonathan Robie wrote:
>
> > Reminds me of the people who thought that managers would be able to read
> > COBOL programs even if they couldn't program, since COBOL has such
> > natural English-based syntax.
>
> Apparently SQL was designed with similar goals, too, which is why I now
> have to suffer when the smart run-time query optimiser Gets It Wrong and
> I have to write contorted SQL to trick the optimiser into scanning the
> tables in the right order when doing a join :-)
>
> Attempts to make programming possible for the non-programmers always
> seem to end in failure. The lesson to learn is that the hard part of
> programming isn't the syntax - it's the mindset.
>
> Things like ColdFusion attempted to make server-side scripting easy for
> people coming from an HTML background by making all the commands look
> like elements and attributes, but it seemed to just spawn a load of
> badly implemented Web sites. It provided an easier learning curve on the
> *syntax* than PHP or ASP or whatever, but you still needed to understand
> HTTP, SQL, Web security, string processing, ...
>
> >
> > Jonathan
> >
>
> ABS
>
>
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