Handling 3 operands in an expression without raising an exception

[Gene Heskett]

On Sunday 29 September 2013 13:03:17 Chris Angelico did opine:

> 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

+1000 or more Chris.  That should be printed, and dye transfered to the 
paint on every coders cubicle wall, with a wall sconce above it for 
illumination.

I have a similar story but it occurred in the broadcast engineering arena, 
back in the middle of the last decade.  I had been to this facility with 
orders to see if I could clean up the technical mess once before.  A year 
later I was back out there, and found one of my fixes undone, with 
disastrous results on the video quality.  So I fixed it again, then, when 
the person nominally in charge of those things wandered in a couple of 
hours later I took him to an out of the traffic and tried to educate him.  
Mind you, he's the one with the degree.  The more I talked the more upset I 
got and I even questioned his family tree.  I figured I was in for a good 
scrap the way I laid into him, but when I finally ran down, he floored me 
by saying that "no one had ever explained cause and effect to him that 
clearly, and why the hell wasn't I teaching someplace?, as I was better by 
far than any prof he ever had in school."

He did I think, finally understand that he was in over his head a wee bit 
trying to keep 4 television stations and a cable channel on the air.  So he 
left for a radio station in NC I was told, because I got sent back a third 
time to keep it running while the commission was cogitating on the license 
transfers to another media group.

Now of course I'm retired, we've since converted to digital broadcasting, 
and much of my knowledge in analog studio stuff is largely moot.  Time 
marches on.  And it gives me time to lurk here, hoping I'll learn a bit of 
python by osmosis.  Please, do carry on.  The comments, often pithy but 
just as often over my now ancient head, are certainly worth the admission.

Cheers, Gene
-- 
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