[long] Re: Legal traps in open source

[Paul Bryan]

On Wednesday 30 October 2002 16:05, Alex Satrapa wrote:
> On Wed, 2002-10-30 at 14:19, Michael Still wrote:
> > I think you have the skill triangle upside down. Are you really trying to
> > argue that Tridge / Rusty / Paulus / whoever is "less skilled" than
> > people who write Makefiles, and perl scripts?
>
> No.  Just arguing that Object Oriented design requires forethought.
>
> The ability to think ahead and plan what you're doing is what really
> separates C/C++ code monkeys from real programmers - but Sam has already
> pointed out to me that it's possible to write crap in Java too.
>

Why are the code monkeys specificially "C/C++ code monkeys" and not "Java 
code monkeys" or just "code monkeys"?

I really don't understand the thought process here. The implication seems to 
be that to write OO you need to be a highly skilled software engineer, but to 
write C code (or more generally, procedural languages) you can just write any 
old thng. Obviously this is way off.

I didn't include C++ here because of the OO aspects of it,  which I find more 
cryptic that Java - more rewarding too <grin>.

Even still, this has nothing to do with whether your using Java or C/C++ or 
writing makefiles anyway. I think your trying to say that the design process 
should be left to the engineers and the coding itself for the less skilled 
memebers of the team. In this model, it's irrelevant whether it's an OO 
system or not, as all programming requires forethought.

In other works, code monkeys can still write OO code and will probably find 
that it's much simpler to use something like Java than to use C/C++. The 
reason Java code tends to be written better than C/C++ is that Java does more 
holding your hand then C/C++. This trades off on flexability, speed and power 
of course.

Paul.