[Gllug] VACANCY: Junior Systems Support

[John Winters]

JLMS wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 1, 2009 at 11:44 AM, John Winters<john at sinodun.org.uk> wrote:
[snip]
>> At this point
>> I realised that I was actually a lot better at programming than most of
>> those around me, despite my lack of an IT degree.
>> <snip>
> 
> Uhm, er, how is that possible?

I don't know - as I said, I didn't do an IT degree, although I did do
quite a lot of formal logic.

I can speculate about it though.  A lot of those I found around me (not
just the graduate trainees) muddled their way through their work by
copying code which seemed to work, never really understanding what it
did or why it worked.  Perhaps the graduate trainees had done much the
same thing to get through their courses?  When you're familiar with
something like De Morgan's Law it seems obvious, but it's the sort of
thing which I've known many programmers struggle with, producing
ridiculously convoluted tests as a result.  The technique used is often
"Copy what worked last time and add a bit".  After a few iterations,
there is a tangled mess which can be cleaned up very quickly by
recursive applications of DML, but it doesn't happen.

John

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