[Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Hugh Perkins]

On 7/16/07, Malcolm Wallace <Malcolm.Wallace at cs.york.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> After all, we would expect the same attributes (intelligence and
> training) from a neurosurgeon, a nuclear scientist, or someone who
> calculates how to land a person on the moon.  Programming computers may
> not seem very skilled to most people, but maybe that is simply because
> we are so familiar with it being done so badly.  I'm all for improving
> the quality of software, and the corollary is that that means improving
> the quality of programmers (by stretching our brains!).
>

You want people doing difficult expensive high-risk tasks to be intelligent
and well trained, but you want their task to be as easy as possible.

Would you rather a nuclear reactor needs to be controlled by feeding in
punch cards, or by having a big round dial labelled "power", that you can
move from 0 to 200 MegaWatts?  Of course, you'd like the guy moving that
dial to be well trained and intelligent.  Welcome to why flying airlines is
well-paid and boring.
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