🚀 go-pugleaf

Gregory H. Anderson writes
> My point is that you only need one or two people who really, really know  
> NeXTSTEP to build a programming shop, corporate-internal or third-party.  
> Everyone else just has to be reasonably smart and open-minded. As I've  
> stated innumerable times, the difficulties learning NeXTSTEP relate to  
> information volume, not concepts. The AppKit, DBKit, IndexingKit, etc.,  
> are just plain BIG, not hard. If you have even one or two person around  
> who know how to navigate them, you can keep a whole shop moving forward.  
> We do it. So can you.

I agree with this almost exactly. We sent three of us to NS camp (4/89).
The has been it --- the rest have learned from apprenticeship and indulging
themselves in the learning experience (reading the manuals, trying stuff out).

I except the concepts of doing the OO architecting well with little
experience, and easily. This is an area where most of us are not doing
very well in the process of learning OO in the large for the first time.

If you have some helpful hints on creating large class hierarchies well -
the parts work together when inherited in part to do new jobs, efficiency
is semi-optimal, the hierarchy is regular and logical to others, the
pieces are general enough to convince new developers to reuse them, and
so forth - I would love to hear them. I wish I had more paths to learning
to point/lead new developers down.

> *soap box on*
> Why won't anyone invest in training their employees anymore? Why must  
> everyone come pre-programmed for the specific job available? I'd rather  
> teach programming to smart liberal arts majors who know how to think, than  
> teach thinking to a bunch of computer linguists who only know how to code.
> *soap box off*

There are a few examples of this, but the standard seems to pay for pre-
trained people. Somehow this seems better. We trained ours, but to staff
quickly hiring trained people is still the only option for most organizations.

Lots of the hiring going on now is quick response stuff - immediate opps.

Mark R. Thomsen