[Gllug] VACANCY: Junior Systems Support
James Laver
gllug at jameslaver.com
Mon Sep 7 12:58:06 UTC 2009
On 7 Sep 2009, at 13:51, Alain Williams wrote:
> One University lecturer who I know is teaching a database course,
> most of it on MS access.
> A bit of MS SQL -- I suggested MySQL (which he doesn't know) and was
> told that it
> is not what they would ever want to know. (or something).
Ah yes. My A-Level coursework in computing comes back to bite me.
We were given two options. Either we should write a program in a
language they approve of (which means VB) or use a relational database
(that means access), or some mix of the two.
Firstly, who considers access a database, let alone relational?
Secondly, visual basic is not a programming language it is a toy, and
thirdly the whole exercise was a joke.
That said, actual code came to about 10% of the mark, the rest of it
was your documentation. No guidance for the documentation was of
course given and most of us made the mistake of actually producing
documentation that a human might want to read, which was certainly not
helping anything. The bit they did want, I think if I ever have to
split a landscape a4 page into two halves, one full of code, one full
of comments explaining the code, ever again, I may just scream.
Embedded comments are bad and real documentation is bad, how do you win?
--James
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