home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- Newsgroups: sci.math
- Path: sparky!uunet!caen!sdd.hp.com!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!ceblair
- From: ceblair@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (Charles Blair)
- Subject: My programming experiences
- Message-ID: <BuL0HD.6zx@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
- Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana
- Date: Mon, 14 Sep 1992 18:53:22 GMT
- Lines: 14
-
- I have a math Ph.D., learned Fortran as undergrad, switched to Pascal
- about six years ago, began writing in C three years ago. It still takes
- me huge amounts of time to get something to work--- a recent program to
- print text next to a chess diagram took about 12 hours. It is certainly
- possible to program badly in any language! I have never even tried to
- do anything that involved numerical analysis.
-
- Even though I haven't really learned it, I can see that there is a skill
- in programming that goes beyond a clear understanding of the algorithm one
- is trying to implement. Perhaps those who are curious about this might
- look at Kernighan's ELEMENTS OF PROGRAMMING STYLE (examples mostly in Fortran).
- If you can guess what the criticisms of the examples will be before reading
- the commentary, you already know quite a lot! (the examples are taken from
- programming texts, indicating that the authors make mistakes too)
-