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From: Pete Dashwood on 26 Jan 2010 07:05
Pete Dashwood wrote:
> Howard Brazee wrote:
>> Anybody read today's Brewster Rockit:Space Guy?
>>
>>
>> http://www.gocomics.com/brewsterrockit/2010/01/25/
>>
>> Good things companies aren't *really* like that..., right?
>
> I get an invalid link when I click on this, Howard.
>
> Pete

Tried it again and it worked! Must have been a temporary glitch.

Yes, we all LOVE HR, don't we? :-)

Pete

--
"I used to write COBOL...now I can do anything."


From: Pete Dashwood on 26 Jan 2010 07:07
Howard Brazee wrote:
> On Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:45:27 +0000 (UTC), docdwarf(a)panix.com () wrote:
>
>> Ahhhhhhh, for the Oldene Dayse... when in-house Programmers could
>> write and debug their own bugs such as *ten* Programmers, working
>> with a store-bought package, cannot, today!
>
>
> http://www.shoeboxblog.com/?p=14400

Absolutely excellent!

Pete.

--
"I used to write COBOL...now I can do anything."


From: Clark F Morris on 26 Jan 2010 15:45
On Tue, 26 Jan 2010 11:55:54 +1300, "Pete Dashwood"
<dashwood(a)removethis.enternet.co.nz> wrote:

>Howard Brazee wrote:
>> On Fri, 22 Jan 2010 21:08:42 -0600, Paul
>> <paul-nospamatall.raulerson(a)mac.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Ah well, I long for the days when I could just sit and write COBOL
>>> and CICS programs.
>>> It was fun then. Perhaps not as well paying, but fun.
>>
>> One trouble is that nowadays, everything impacts everything. Despite
>> OO isolation, we find that some incompetent code somewhere else either
>> impacts our work now, or will with some future upgrade.
>>
>> We are much more vulnerable to what others do wrong.
>>
>> Nowadays, a much higher percentage of programmers are support
>> programmers instead of applications programmers. And everything
>> they do impacts programming.
>>
>> Companies tend to buy packages, then modify them to fit their needs.
>> They usually say that their goal is to keep such modifications as
>> little as possible, but there is always creep. Then the package has
>> some upgrades, and programmers spend a lot of time comparing code to
>> get those upgrades in without breaking the modifications.
>>
>> The applications programming becomes less and less part of the job,
>> and making sure different components aren't stepping on others is more
>> of the job.
>>
>> So we beg for competence everywhere else, and long for the days when
>> we predominately created & upgraded applications.
>
>Interesting observation, Howard.
>
>I think that most programmers are suspicious of anything "not invented
>here".
>
>It seems to be the nature of the job that it appeals to control freaks :-)
>
>Personally, I have no problem with tailoring packages or other people's code
>where it makes sense to do so.

As someone whose job for many years was installing and tailoring that
peculiar application known as the operating system, its components and
related utilities, I can relate to the problems Howard lists. It is
hard enough figuring what I did six months ago and the thought behind
it. Now take something for which you only have documentation that
doesn't quite address the peculiar requirement coming from management
and it gets interesting. I am used to the FDE (Fragmented Development
Environment) provided by IBM and making certain that tweaking one
thing didn't break something else got to be interesting at times. And
then there were the upgrades that broke your modifications. Sometimes
you did get good news that your modifications were no longer needed
because an upgrade provided the function. Then there was only the
minor problem of getting everyone to do it the new way.

I also hope that packages have come a long way from those we installed
in the 1980s and 1990s. Evn then with the tweaking by parameter input
still can be interesting and broken by upgrades. The testing ad
documentation can also be interesting including finding where someone
did what 6 months later. Of course the same problems exist with home
grown applications of any size but we will ignore that.
>
>Pete.
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