Humor: Cargo Cult Programming

[Tom Buskey]

bscott at ntisys.com said:
>On Wed, 13 Nov 2002, at 5:08pm, sconce at in-spec-inc.com wrote:
>> It is OFTEN easier in Python to try it than to guess.
>> (Also, easier to try it than to RTFM...  :) 
>
>  While I agree with you, it is with some trepidation.  Learning a system
>without learning the hows and whys behind it can lead to "cargo cult
>programming", where the programmer does something completely unneeded (or
>outright wrong), because he or she doesn't understand what he is *really*
>doing.

I like that term.  When I was in High School I tried to learn UCSD
Pascal on the Apple ][.  The compiler had a handy built in bugger.  If
your code was bug free, sometimes it would helpfully add a bug or 2. I
got in the habit of recompiling if it didn't run.  Thank goodness Turbo
Pascal was so much quicker when I got to college.  I eventually learned
that a recompile didn't help :-)  Many years later I learned about that 
quirk of Apple Pascal.

I think that kind of thing (recompiling) would've been helped if I 
could've read a FAQ.  Too bad we didn't have internet access back then. 
 You'd think the magazines of the time would cover it when they ran an 
Apple Pascal piece.

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Tom Buskey