You don't know how lucky you are.

[Aahz]

In article <3EC73657.EAFDA141 at easystreet.com>,  <achrist at easystreet.com> wrote:
>
>The XP guys always ask, "What's the simplest thing that could possibly
>work?"  Sounds like he found it.  RPG guys were kind of like that.  I
>had one working for me for a while, and I couldn't keep him out of my
>office.  Everything I gave him to do, he'd be back in 15 minutes with
>it finished.  I don't think he knew much about alogorithm design, and
>I didn't want to know what was in his programs any more than I wanted
>to know what was in my lunch at the company cafeteria, but whatever it
>was, no matter how ugly, he was good at it.

Yup.  I think I've told this story before, but whattheheck:

When I was taking CS in college, I was annoyed about not being able to
use the power of TurboPascal instead of the brain-dead standard Pascal
on the VAXen.  One assignment we had was to convert a string to a
number.  I couldn't use the simple conversion utilities from TP, but I
was determined to find something that didn't require actual work.  Turns
out that standard Pascal has a mechanism for writing and reading unnamed
temporary files.  So I wrote the string out and read it back as a
number.  I got annoyed at my prof for flunking that assignment, because
I'd followed his spec precisely....
-- 
Aahz (aahz at pythoncraft.com)           <*>         http://www.pythoncraft.com/

"In many ways, it's a dull language, borrowing solid old concepts from
many other languages & styles:  boring syntax, unsurprising semantics,
few automatic coercions, etc etc.  But that's one of the things I like
about it."  --Tim Peters on Python, 16 Sep 93