[FRIAM] alternative response

[∄ uǝlƃ]

Exactly. Maybe this is one of the important points Nick has been asking for regarding computational thinking or "software engineering"? One of the lessons I have to teach the youngsters unfortunate enough to require my teaching is that they absolutely have to READ THE CODE. They come into a project reading the words in published papers, or thinking about some architecture they infer from diagrams or lists of file names, or wherever their brain farts come from. But I shout again and again, from day one, read the code. Read the code! READ THE DAMNED CODE! It can take months to years to get them to actually read the code ... even if I refuse to talk to them until they point to a line of code we can talk about.

In essence, "read the code" means you have to play someone else's game. The rules are all set up there in the code. The trouble is always that the youngsters have trouble playing someone else's game, thinking like someone else, working within a system designed by someone else.

Maybe this is an insight Nick is asking for? Professional programmers spend their entire careers dealing with others' garbage code. And it's largely irrelevant whether that code *could* be made better, more this, more that. Even if you write from scratch, have strict standards and everyone on the team uses the same patterns, you pair program, yaddayadda. There's always someone else's game you'll eventually have to play, even if only to decide that it's garbage and rewrite it according to your rules.

On 6/17/20 10:38 AM, Jon Zingale wrote:
> At the end of the day, deciding whether or not
> the universe is determined, indeterminate, random, etc.. is decidedly
> uninteresting. I try to hold 50 conflicting ontological commitments before
> breakfast. Alas, it appears that we have no interest in working with the
> commitments others make.

-- 
☣ uǝlƃ