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

> Elsewhere in this thread it is claimed that other cultures are less
> likely to say 'no' than the USA.  I find that difficult to imagine,
> let alone realize.

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.  With the reducing social mobility we see in the
West these days I suspect we're headed back that way too - just
because one side laid down its arms in the class war doesn't mean that
the other side will!

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.  It was as if someone had attempted to bootstrap a
software dev process from a lurid and hopeless textbook, ignoring the
need for appropriate engineering culture.  I'm sure the Indian
software industry will get there, and probably quite soon, say in a
decade; but -an interesting inversion - talking about this with a
finance director chum who's done a bit of outsourcing with some
success, thought it would take much longer, and when it got there
be no cheaper.

John