[54] in Athena_Backup_System
All of these concerns
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Diane Delgado)
Fri Dec 9 10:50:30 1994
To: athena-backup@MIT.EDU
Date: Fri, 09 Dec 1994 10:49:40 EST
From: Diane Delgado <delgado@MIT.EDU>
Well now, I've now gone through all of this and there is one question
that I have have either Jeff or Ted read the low-level design?
From Ted's ranting it appears that he has not read the design
which specifically states that the database code is denoted
as a "critical region" which is guarded by mutex to prevent
the two threads from executing database code at the same time.
As mentioned in the ABS meeting, we will do the same for other subsystems,
such as Kerberos which is not reentrant but should be.
Mutex, semaphores and the like are not a novel idea, this was
actually introduced years ago by Djirkstra (spelling probably
isn't correct) and was taught at the University which I attend
(even that long ago!).
As far as not having addressed any of the concerns raised in the
initial design review, I belive the team has gone to great lengths
to analyze the concerns and address what we percieve to be the issues.
We have actually incorporated some of the valid concerns into our
design, and anyone who has read the low level design document will be aware
of this.
All of the mail points to the fact that there has been a lot of ranting
but not any reading.
The second issue which should be addressed is that I don't agree
that we should drop the standards and all work at an elementary
level because a few people can't cut the mustard. It's almost
like our public education system, when you drop the performance
standard because a few students can't read at the required level,
the end result is that the majority of the students will revert
to this sub-standard level. I don't believe we should revert to
doing high-school level programming so that we can hire less
competent people. This will not contribute to the quality of the
organization as a whole, and over time the organization will become
incompetent, inept, and provide poor quality to its customers.
With this attitude let's throw away all of our C code and go
back to Basic programming.
I believe that there is a place for programmers of less skill in an
organization, but I don't believe the organization should be composed
entirely of mediocre programmers nor should our environment be
tailored to ensure mediocrity in everyone. A mediocre environemnt
will not retain the highly-skill people needed to execute the more
difficult tasks and the end result will be disasterous and not
cost effective. It is sometimes tempting to spend less money on
salaries, but you mostly get what you pay for. If the institute
wants to save money in the area of computer personnel, we should look
at many of the in-efficient processes which hinder our productivity on
a day-to-day basis; resolving the inefficiencies in our environment
will go a long way towards making highly skilled and motivated people
even more productive.
The above drive towards mediocrity is more disturbing and disasterous than
threads itself!
