john gilmore wrote:
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 . . .
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I would accept that (very sensible) modification.
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