On 1 Mar, 23:47, Owen Duffy wrote:
(Geoffrey S. Mendelson) wrote :

...

Experienced scientific and engineering programers know this and
compensate. "Teach yourself Visual whatever in a week" programmers
don't.

The biggest problem with visual whatever programmers is they tend to
be seduced by the flashy interface and ignore the substance under it.

As an experienced scientific / engineering software developer, I suggest
that much the same issues exist in a conventional 3GL language as in the
"Visual xxx" environment. Good software doesn't just happen, it takes
(aside of the relatively trivial task of writing the functional
elements), huge effort in dealing with exceptions, and testing, testing,
testing.

If you dig deep into the source of Fortran programs, you will often find
the heritage of small memory and slow processors in days gone by, where
implementers used COMMON for variables to reduce memory use, and used
COMMON for passing parameters to avoid the overhead of parameter passing
function calls. This practice was, IMHO, the greatest risk to accuracy in
such programs, and the area that demanded the greatest attention to
design and documentation. The public NEC2 code uses COMMON, and the last
bug that I demonstrated in a C port of the code was related to messed up
parameter passing in COMMON.

So, the old 3GL world wasn't that good anyway!

Owen

All very interesting Geoffrey and Owen and really it all adds up that
we need more supervision of programmers when they pupport to be
experts. I have used AO for many many years all with the understanding
that the author had his work hacked that forced him
to give up merchandising the effort. So for many years I used the
program on the basis if I didn't like the answer then ignor the
result. Time has shown that with all these so called antenna programs
all users are doing the same thing.....if you don't like the response
then it is garbage in garbage out and I was as guilty as everybody
else.It was for that reason I put a program test on this newsgroup
such that the results given normally would raise eyebrows. Even asked
Arie to check his but only silence reigned which emphasises that
people are just lazy or choose to remain silent when un unsuitable
answer occurrs.( This also emphasises what a great job W4RLN is doing
for ham radio where he points out where all the programs differ and
who he perceives as correct To me it shows that the human mind really
only believes what he wants to believe
so a program with high gain results is the best seller even tho
inaccurate.
Art