The Best Job They Know How To Do
Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand. -- "The Retrospective Prime Directive" by Norm Kerth Software, as Dr. Ralph Johnson informed us, is distilled experience. Writing software, Ray Scheufler reminds us, is a process of making decisions. To make decisions, we have to understand the system we're working in, and the consequences of our decisions. That means that most of the work of a programmer is learning, and very little of it actually involves typing. Understanding any existing body of software is involves understanding the domain, the user being served, the specific problem being solved, the solution chosen, the techniques of safe software development, the organization producing the project, and the technology (language, operating system, network...