[plt-scheme] Re: Programming for non-programmers

John Kozak wrote:

> It's really not that unusual - consider "Up to a point, Lord Copper".
> Regarding India, one of the travellers' clichés is that asking a
> local person the question "does this road go to X" will yield "yes"
> for all values of X.  

The statistics that say more than 60+% of software projects are
delayed or never delivered, in good part because of difficulty saying
"no" to unreasonable demands, were not compiled in India.  They were
very much compiled in the western hemisphere.

> I've seen close-up only one project outsourced to India and that was a
> major disaster (company in question went bust); I'd make similar
> observations to those already made about code quality, but what I
> found most noticeable was the complete lack of any of the normal
> practices of software development - no version control, no automatic
> build process.  

This anecdotal complaint is not much different from what I hear from
some of my own students who work in the US.  Moreover, as of last
year, over 70% of the organizations world-wide that had achieved CMM
Level 5 were in India.

Shriram