ABSTRACT
DRAWING STORIES FROM HIS EXPERIENCES, Dr. Jayaram was explaining to CAD/CAM students how difficult it could be to read someone else’s computer programs, or even one’s own programs after a period of time. Substituting for West while he attended a professional meeting out of town, Jayaram was raising a common problem in engineering programming. “At the beginning of my master’s program,’’ Jayaram told the class, “I wrote a piece of code about six hundred to seven hundred lines long…. Certain things needed to be done, and they just had to go into the code.’’ He was clearly proud that his code was still in use: “Even now that piece of code is being used by others working in the same field.’’ The problem, however, is that people have trouble reading it when they try to take it apart:
They come and ask me, you know, what did you do here? I cannot tell them what happened. I do not know what I did there. … I could not understand the code after a few years, and I doubt if anybody else could.
