[TenTec] Being a Contrarian...."

[Grant Youngman]

> One of the problems with the Orion is that the genius behind 
> the code in it left the company. 

Urban myths die hard.  Sometimes, they become articles of faith -- or entire
religious movements, burning heretics at the stake.  If I were the current
team at T-T, I'd just want to slap somebody :-)

> Young programmers think that code must "look pretty", 
> use all sorts of obscure techniques, etc or drastically over complicate
things.

This is why progamming is not fun anymore.  The "art" of the task -- simple
yet elegant code doing very complex tasks, that may not read as easily as a
novel to someone else, that may make "unusual" use of machine resources and
is very unlike the form defined by the current pop book on the "structured
methodology" du jour -- is no longer an approved form.  I seem to recall a
programmer's note at the start of some disk routines in the PDP-8,
announcing (paraphrased) "Do not try to understand this code, just use it
and love it", or something like that :-)

Grant/NQ5T