Subj : Re: Academic grades and programming
To   : comp.programming
From : Rob Thorpe
Date : Tue Jul 26 2005 12:48 pm

Arthur J. O'Dwyer wrote:
> 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>

Speaking of code as being "proprietry" and "open-source" (or "free
software") creates a clear distinction.

My experience matches yours and Jon's.  The little bit of code I
maintain in my work was written by a Fortran programmer in C++ but
often using only the C features.  It has all manner of eccentricities,
for instance it interfaces to a certain piece of hardware using a very
complicated DCOM interface.  It could simply send strings to a port.
The DCOM interface was written to annoy the Sysadmin, to force him to
enable DCOM which he'd disabled for security reasons.

Open/Free software is generally much better.

>    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.

Funnily enough, the code I mention above that I maintain is commented
in exactly this way.  The comments are the best part.

.