Re: [SPAM?] [xml-dev] in which I surrender a 15-year-old argument (trans

[Norman Gray <norman@astro.gla.ac.uk>]

Pete, hello.

On 2014 Apr 3, at 10:47, Pete Cordell <petexmldev@codalogic.com> wrote:

> http://www.flowextension.com/
> 
> Seems a lot of effort to go to for an April Fools, but maybe that's changed these days also!

It does seem elaborate, but phrases like "tons of documentation pages that contain a lot of irrelevant words and sentences" (ewwww, words! Give Me Teh Codez!) and "Instead of opening your browser, and wasting your time searching in StackOverflow, MSDN, etc..." would in other circumstances be tells.  I don't think it actually is a spoof, but it has all the grim satire of one.

I think if I was employing someone to write code for me, and I caught them using something like that, I'd check their contract to see if I could fire them.  I occasionally use code snippets from places like Stack Overflow (wonderful place), but I do so, myself, by re-typing the stuff into the editor, from the screen, to ensure that I understand and internalise what every part of the example is doing, so I don't have to do this a second time.  That's maybe a little extreme, and cutting-and-pasting would probably be reasonable in most cases; but if a code-monkey is doing this so often that it's worth their while installing an extension like this, then that's evidence they're simply not competent with the language they're writing, and that what they're writing is probably rubbish (in ways that have been mentioned on this thread already).

[sorry -- drifting off-topic]

All the best,

Norman


-- 
Norman Gray  :  http://nxg.me.uk
SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK