Viewing profile — BearfootCoder

There was a significant drop in birthrates in the 1920s because millions of the men who would have fathered those children were dead.

Group of people == team because all report to same manager. Manager in charge of multiple different projects because "success in organisation" == "number of people managed" regardl…

Lots of people here seem very upset at the idea that someone could write their memoires at thirty. While it wouldn't be something for me (either to do or to read), I can think of l…

I've been working in IT for 30 odd years, 24 entirely office based, 6 some combination of hybrid and home, and in my view the argument that innovation and creativity are uniquely f…

There's a good discussion of this at https://medium.com/the-technical-archaeologist/is-cobol-hold... . It starts off by suggesting that it's all about how COBOL's superiority stems…

It’s easy to look at this article, see assertions which are absolutely the opposite of ones personal experience and conclude that the author is an idiot. For example, I almost enti…

The idea of the vomit draft works for narrative text because it's aimed at human consumers and humans are very adaptable when it comes to accepting input. We can absorb a whole bun…

I recently had to install a copy of Windows 10 Home onto one of my spare laptops, and there are at two things that hit the "stupidly intrusive and annoying" buttons. One: moving th…

Becoming a "good writer", like becoming a good anything, is a matter of practice and study, of learning to use the tools which language provides. The ability to construct well-form…

Having had a range of early programming experiences, including BASIC and assembler on a ZX Spectrum,Pascal on an ICL mini and PL/1 on an IBM Mainframe,nothing I had seen or worked …

First job, support technician on a years work experience from college. That was the year the great storm brought down trees and power cables over half of southern England. The offi…

The inverse of this is also useful: // Dear maintainer, // The code which follows was hacked together under desperate pressure. // It's not smart. // It's not doing anything really…

Best: if it's complicated, it's wrong. Worst: almost no business deliverable is one tenth as important as the people telling you to give up your time, strength and sanity in order …

Words which serve no purpose have no place on the page. But purpose varies with context. If you're writing a guide to a new API, or a functional specification, then it pays to be a…

There's a much quoted aphorism with regard to getting feed back on fiction: "If five people tell you there's a problem, they're almost certainly right. If they tell you how to fix …

As others have said, I wouldn't worry about C++ going anywhere soon. The sheer amount of historic code out there, and the difficulty of replacing that code with any of the potentia…

That only works if the user of the software has freedom of choice over the software they use. For the majority of commercial software sales that is not the case. Commercial softwar…