<nettime> The brutal truth about software

[David Mandl <dmandl@panix.com>]

My latest piece for the Register:

"There’s a kind of cognitive dissonance in most people who’ve moved from the academic study of computer science to a job as a real-world software developer. The conflict lies in the fact that, whereas nearly every sample program in every textbook is a perfect and well-thought-out specimen, virtually no software out in the wild is, and this is rarely acknowledged.

"To be precise: a tremendous amount of source code written for real applications is not merely less perfect than the simple examples seen in school--it’s outright terrible by any number of measures."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/21/financial_software_disasters/

--
Dave Mandl
dmandl@panix.com
davem@wfmu.org
Web: http://dmandl.tumblr.com/
Twitter: @dmandl
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