On Wed, 2009-04-15 at 21:26 -0700, William "Chops" Westfield wrote:
> On Apr 15, 2009, at 2:24 PM, Herbert Graf wrote:
> 
> > Similar situation, 4th year, one of the final EE labs (I think it  
> > was an analog electronics course), a few people came to me, VERY  
> > smart people, asking which side of a diode was the cathode...
> 
> I dunno.  I've heard that it's very rare to have a SW engineering  
> applicant be able to write out an error-free example of some common  
> algorithm (say, a binary search.)  In some ways, that's a bit sad.  On  
> the other hand, I personally hardly ever even TRY to get perfect code  
> the first time; the compiler will find my missing semicolons or  
> misspelled keywords in a lot less time than it would have taken me to  
> be anal about them in the first place.  The idea that code has to be  
> completely correct before you try it out dates back to the days when  
> it was going to take hours and cost "real money" to have your card  
> deck scheduled through the chain of steps it took to actually run it...

I'm not sure why you are responding to my message with this. FWIW I
agree, I never try to write code to be "100% perfect" off hand, that's
what the compiler is for. My boss has a favourite saying: let the tool
do the work.

OTOH, for a 4th year EE just about to graduate not to know which side of
a diode is a cathode was very disturbing to me. These WEREN'T CEs, these
were EEs who had been exposed to diodes in 1st year labs.

TTYL

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