I think, as a whole, what was interesting about this paper, and this week's readings in general is that they both focus highly on documentation. Seeing this, I am forced to think about our current attitudes towards documentation.

As I somewhat mentioned in my last reaction, we currently do not look at documentation as an equal to programming or designing. It is of the lower caste, if I may say so. Why is this so?

Perhaps one reason is that people tend to do this is that many people approach programming with a "hack" mentality. What I mean by this is that people want to sit down, type some stuff in, and see results. They don't tend to care how it gets done. Now by teaching object-oriented design and programming we try to draw the focus away from this, but how well do we succeed?

Adding documentation as an extra dimension to the world of programming may just make people care about the process as well as the product. It may also, as is suggested by Knuth, help people write better code by making them think about their code as someone who would have other people read it.

Frameworks for design have the same appeal in that one is producing something that clarifies the program for others to read. As noted, this may be beneficial.

MY COMMENTS

MY COMMENTS

Could the "hack" mentality be due to limited time? I still vow that this is due to the desire for functionality over beauty. The same thing occurs with an English paper. It is the nite before and you have not started. Do you want a reasonably long cover-all-the-bases paper or are you going to focus on a few excellent points? More than likely, with limited time you are going to forget style and design...

Hey! I thought the idea of these frameworks was that people would insert their names, not just put "MY NAME"! :-)
Anyway, I would not call the emphasis on getting results a "hack" mentality. Computer programs are written in order to do something, usually to solve some problem. If they do not succeed in solving that problem, or having the required functionality, how nicely they are commented does not add up to much. Do people complain about Microsoft's poor commenting skills? Do people get upset in cs15 because their code is not readable? It is getting the Tetris piece moving down the screen which is the student's primary goal, and making the ship date with a working product which is the goal in industry. This does cause problems, and often results in "ugly" code, but I think it is very natural given the nature of the beast we are speaking of.