Reply to post: Outlawing cutlery, making Sporks (rather than education) the new gold Standard

Rust in peace: Memory bugs in C and C++ code cause security issues so Microsoft is considering alternatives once again

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

Outlawing cutlery, making Sporks (rather than education) the new gold Standard

Since training your million monkeys to properly use cutlery far exceeds their intellectual skills.

Writing extremely close to error-free software is *NO* rocket science. I found it quite easy and beneficial, when I saw that its possible (thanks to Donald E. Knuth), and actually not all that difficult. It takes some amount of devotion, pride of what you're doing, acceptance of blame and willingness to improve your own habits to match your own skills. I've been doing this successfully for 24 years working in a software company that produces commercial business software. (but admittedly, there are very few folks around me that do likewise, the amount of clue- and learning-resistant code monkeys is quite high in the software business).

Learning old dogs new tricks can be just as hard with old code monkeys, so the real problem is with **management**, which is responsible for a complete lack of **USEFUL** education&training of young software engineers. Pretty much all of what is offered, is not going to make folks more skilled and more competent programmers. Unless you train yourself, it just doesn't happen in most software companies.

Two of the effects that are making it hard for organizations to get out of the hole which they've dug themselves in:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

and managers either being simply unable to recognize and recruit folks that are more compentent than themselves, or managers that are highly afraid of hiring staff more competent than themselves.

Look at the extremely poor state of misery of the Google Android Stagefright Media Framework. Security Princess Parisa Tabriz seems to have turned two blind eyes towards significant areas of extremely poor software development within Google. Since 2015 Google keeps on playing whack-a-mole with serious Stagefright Bugs that are essentially all caused by the very same incompetencies / lack-of-skills of the irresponsible developers who created them, and their irresponsible managers who should have called in for a complete code review after the first completely braindead bugs were admitted in 2015. If you look at the July 2019 Android Patches, the folks a Google (ir)responsible for Android, have been playing whack-a-mole over the past 4 years straight.

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