[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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