Handling 3 operands in an expression without raising an exception

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 2:07 AM, Joel Goldstick
<joel.goldstick at gmail.com> wrote:
> Here's my question:  I wonder if Nikos has ever been employed to write
> software.  If so, I wonder how long he lasted before he was let go.

Unfortunately that proves nothing. My boss used to have another
employee besides me - he lasted for several years before he finally
quit (wasn't fired). In retrospect, my boss wishes he'd fired him a
lot sooner, but hindsight is 20/20, they say. We've since ripped out
every line of code this guy wrote and rewritten from scratch. No,
merely holding down a job doesn't prove anything more than that your
boss hasn't gone through and evaluated your code. In my example, it
was because the boss was too busy (he knew stuff was taking a long
time to get written and debugged, he didn't know it was because the
code was trash); in other cases, I have no doubt, it's because the
boss has no clue what makes good code. That's why he hired a
programmer, after all - to do what he can't do himself. It's
unfortunately not difficult for someone to be employed to do something
he's utterly incompetent to do.

ChrisA