Quote of the Day
Another flaw in the human character is thatPersonal Comment on Today's QOTD
I got my IT start as an APL programmer/analyst, and I did more than my fair share of maintenance programming, particularly when I moved to Houston working in the timesharing industry for clients like Exxon and Shell. If an application broke, that meant the customer wasn't using metered computer time, which was the heart and soul of our business model. To be honest, I'm the best I've ever seen in the role, although I didn't know that many programmers. It was more intrinsically difficult with APL, a cryptic, idiosyncratic, heavily notated programming language, typically undocumented. Programmers had their own coding style and had a macho attitude that delighted in writing as short programs as possible, including repeatedly reassigned and abbreviated, nonsuggestive variable names, without comments. I could do it, read other people's code, including debugging dozens of student programs; I've previously blogged one of my favorite stories: one day my colleague Jeff came to me. He had patched some code putting out a fire 2 weeks earlier but couldn't remember what he did and asked me to look at it. Not only could I perfectly read "Jeff code", but I knew why he patched it and a better way of doing the fix. In fact, I was/am so good at APL, I gave my first graduate school lecture as a guest in John Ricketts' DSS course; Ricketts, who later served on my UH dissertation committee, was stressing APL as a rapid prototyping language.
The problem was that I really didn't want to be so good a maintenance programmer that I would be impossible to replace and typecast in the role. Most of us want to write our own applications and I was a talented developer, not preferring to fix someone else's incompetent obscure crap. That is why I became obsessed with documentation, a topic I researched and published on a number of occasions during my brief academic career. Initially my strategy was to train my replacement so I could be promoted.
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