hardcopy/productivity inverse correlation

[Paul D. Smith]

[] I invite commentary and/or anecdotes for or against the following
[] thesis:

[]     There is, in general, an inverse correlation between the amount
[]     of source code hardcopy a programmer employs and the
[]     productivity of that programmer.

[] In my observation, the least competent programmers tend to print
[] updated listings of every line of every file of their source code
[] at the same time every day, and go through them with highlighters.
[] The best programmers I have known don't even care if "lpr" exists
[] or not.

Hmm.  I'm not prepared to comment on most cases of this thesis, but I
will propose a lemma:

Lemma 1:    The above thesis does not hold if the programmer in
            question is working with code not originally written by
            himself or herself.

I rarely resort to printouts of my own code (I'm sure I'm at least a
competent programmer ... :-), but whenever I have to maintain / modify
code written by someone else I generally end up having to get a
printout and wade around in it.  GNU Emacs TAGS, etc. are great, but
even with 55-line windows like I have on my AViiON workstation I
sometimes can't get all the relevent info on at once ...

This is especially true (obviously) with uncommented and/or awkwardly
structured code.  *My* code is quite clear to anyone looking at it, so
obviously Lemma 1 does not hold for programmers working with my code
:-) :-)
--

                                                                paul
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