Subj : Re: Industry Calls for More Foreign Programmers
To   : comp.programming
From : Christopher Barber
Date : Fri Aug 19 2005 11:02 am

spinoza1111@yahoo.com wrote:
> In other words: legacy systems create legacy systems bureaucracies
> which have their own goals, and those goals do not coincide with the
> goals of all stakeholders.
> 
> Within legacy systems bureaucracies, a "reality distortion field" is
> created in which assertions which are mathematically false can become
> true.
> 
> For example, engineering users in my experience use broken compilers
> for in-house languages for years while "working around" the fact that
> the compiler fails to conform to the published syntax of the language.
> Because the engineers have released source code which only compiles
> under the broken compiler, a computer science A+ student who "fixes"
> the compiler, by making its parser conform to the documented language,
> has, in the reality distortion field, messed up.

If the language is in-house, then the company is responsible for both the 
language spec and the implementation, so if the implementation does not match 
the spec the problem might lie with either.  If the spec is wrong, then fixing 
the implementation would be incorrect.  Even if the spec was correct and it is 
known that users might be depending on the incorrect implementation in some 
way, a good developer will make sure that fixing the problem will not overly 
inconvenience users.  Anyone who fixes such a problem without thinking of the 
consequences has indeed messed up.

I agree that bureaucracies can often lead to bad engineering decisions, but I 
don't think this is really an example of that.

- Christopher

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