How to Criticize Computer Scientists (2001)

I used to work with bioinformaticians, and often wasn't impressed by a lot of the code that they churned out. But to be fair a lot of the work was just to produce a one off graph / heatmap to prove or disprove something, so most of the time it wasn't so important.

> I can barely understand code I wrote 6 months ago and I've written plenty of Perl in the past, too. The idea that code should be so easily understood that to ask a question would make one seem inadequate strikes me as a fanciful dream.

This was a big learning experience for me. I wrote and maintained a Django based system for four and a half years. When I couldn't understand my own code a few months later it was time to refactor. Ask yourself why you don't understand it and how you would expect it to be if it was written in an easier to understand way. It will save you time in the long run. Ex-colleagues commented that they found my code / database design fairly logical after I had left that job.

I've seen 2 kinds of people that usually make this comment. Some do because niche-thing is the one they currently know better, and they have to make some comment, so they ask about what they know better. The others are the more interesting kind, they ask because they want to use niche-thing in some new way, so if you did for a chance consider it, they are very interested in it, and if you didn't, it may be an opportunity for them.

The only problem was that under real conditions his code behaved like the stack was infinite; you know like it is in a theoretical computer.

This also applies to industry. This is basically managing up 101 for engineers. If the boss thinks it's their idea, it'll get approved and supported. If they think it's someone else's idea, depending on environment, it'll get blocked or sabotaged.