I agree with both the tone and the substance of Rick Fochtman's recent post,
but the words
IMHO, the only criterion should be whether someone who's never seen the
code before can
pick up a listing and understand what it's doing well enough to maintain or
debug it
do require qualification; at least the word 'someone' does. We lack an
analogue, but patent lawyers make very good use of the notion of 'someone
learned in the art' (SLITA). The notion that a tyro must understand code
when he looks at it has always been and continues to be stultifying. I
would thus reformulate Rick's criterion as something like
SLITA must be able to pick up a listing and understand . . .
John Gilmore
Ashland, MA 01721-1817
USA
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