Novices

[COTTRELL, JAMES]

/*
> > FLAME OF MY OWN:
> > People such as Mr. Harris should be aware that not all people participating
> > in this forum are experts.  The question was a valid one, and deserved a
> > reasonable response, not a better-than-thou dissertation.  Such responses
> > just intimidate people who might otherwise benefit by asking questions of
> > this type.

Looks like you upset someone.

> People who use the C language should be sufficiently expert that they
> understand that "long" and "short" should not be selected in favor of "int"
> only if they are of different sizes on the machine you're coding on.

One learns by doing. And making mistakes.

> Period.  

Are you on yours?

> If a C programmer doesn't understand that, then they have not been
> adequately trained in the C language and should not use the C language until
> they have been so trained.  From the questions put forth in net.lang.c, it's
> apparent that the training offered to many C programmers is abysmal.

Make that programmers in general. Many of them are geology & psychology
majors that got smart & decided to make some money. Not to mention
Computer Learning Center. Only recently (~ ten years) have Computer
Science degrees been commonly available.

> I'm not in the business of training C programmers.

One would never know it. Anytime anyone mentions anything about 
null pointers, casts, arrays vs pointers, portability, lint, etc. you
feel compelled to enlighten them. I don't blame you for getting tired
of it, but Guy Harris is not going to save the world. They'll learn.
Besides, reading your treatises is almost as boring as reading dumb
questions. Ignore them, maybe the'll go away.

> I *am*, unfortunately, in
> the business of fixing the mistakes made by inexpert C programmers.  I wish
> I weren't in that business.

Are you sure? Why do you think they pay us those big bux? That ain't working,
that's the way you do it. Money for nothing, and your ticks for free.

> Perhaps there should be separate newsgroups for
> novice and expert C users; however, the difference between the level of
> expertise exhibited by posters to net.unix and net.unix-wizards has steadily
> diminished over time.

One can not at the same time take pride in one's own expertise while
lamenting the inexperience of others. Choose one or the other.

> In any case, net.lang.c should *not* be forced to serve as a place where
> people pick up information that should have been imparted to them when they
> learned C but wasn't.

Hey, welcome to the net.

> The proper use of "short", "int", and "long" very
> definitely falls into "what you should have learned before you started to
> use C".

People do what works. The distinxion between short, int, & long, 
regarding portability is a subtle point which is learned over time.
Besides, lots of people never port programs.

> Unfortunately, a look at the number of programs posted to
> "net.sources" which have to have "int"s replaced by "long"s before they run
> on machines other than the VAX for which they were written indicates that
> far too few people *do* learn the proper use of "short", "int", and "long".

BFD. You know how to use sed & lint, right?

> If people were as careless at using, say, saws as they were at using the C
> programming language, the rate at which people lost fingers in their
> workshops would be a national disgrace.

And if people built bridges the way they wrote programs, the first
woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.

> Read some of the postings in the
> "net.bugs" groups if you don't believe me.

I'll take your word for it.

> A *lot* of those bugs are simply
> bonehead coding errors;

If one must make errors, they might as well be stupid ones. `Smart' ones
are hard to track down.

> The disgrace is that they come from a system which
> is shipped and supported by a Large American Corporation.

Thank god someone is complaining about them at last. All one hears about
are the bugs from a certain Large American University.

> I don't know if
> other such systems have such a large proportion of bugs caused by stupid
> errors like not checking whether a pointer is null before using it (I doubt
> that occurs nearly as much on VMS, because VMS does *not* map location zero
> into a process' address space), but if they do we have an even bigger
> problem.
> 
> 	Guy Harris

VMS has its own problems.

I guess what I'm trying to say is mellow out. Many people respect you
for your knowledge (including myself. We have had our differences, but
I can see you know your stuff); don't blow it by yelling at novices.
I used to annoy some of my coworkers about the way they coded. They
just weren't interested in being taught.

I'm sure you have better things to do. At least you get paid for
fixing bugs. Who pays you to post?

This was meant to be a friendly letter. I guess I didn't do very well.
I am trying to put our differences to rest. Forgive my third comment.
I guess I say too much of myself in you this time :-)
Hey, is this net.wax.philosophic or what? Take care.

	jim		cottrell at nbs
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