Subj : Re: Academic grades and programming
To   : comp.programming
From : Arthur J. O'Dwyer
Date : Tue Jul 26 2005 01:47 pm


On Tue, 26 Jul 2005, Jon Harrop wrote:
>
> Ivan Mascovich wrote:
>> Jyrki Alakuijala <Jyrki.Alakuijala@find.me.via.google> wrote...
>>> I have had more successful experiences working with Ph.D. and M.Sc.
>>> level coders, especially when top-of-the-class, than one with mediocre
>>> university performance or B.Sc level studies.
>>
>> I've had the opposite experience. Those with graduate degrees in CS tend
>> to be the WORST domestic coders.
>>
>> Code produced in academia (eg X Windows), next to offshored code, tends to
>> be the worst I've seen.
>
> What kind of code are you thinking of?
>
> Lots of open source software is written in academia, e.g. OCaml and much of
> Linux, and is of very high quality. I'd be hard pressed to think of any
> high quality commercial code, other than my own. ;-)

   Note that the opposite of "commercial" is not "open source." I can't 
tell whether you mean you've never seen any decent commercial open-source 
code (bad), or just that you haven't seen any decent closed-source code
(which is to be expected, given that few people see any closed-source 
code of any quality, by definition!).  </rant>

   From my /extremely/ limited experience with commercial and academic
code, I do have to agree with you: Academic code is often much cleaner
conceptually. But Ivan may mean something different by "worst." For
example, most academic code I've seen tends to be written in a very
idiosyncratic coding style --- lots of whitespace or no whitespace,
many variable declarations per line, comment blocks that look

    /*******************************
    /* COMMENT BLOCK
    /* like this,
    /*******************************/

and so on. But that's the easy stuff to fix.

-Arthur,
my uninformed $.02

.