[erlang-questions] Erlang web servers challenge

[Michael Richter]

On 11 July 2011 08:13, Richard O'Keefe <ok@REDACTED> wrote:

> What I *got* was students telling me they couldn't read code on
> paper; they needed syntax-colouring IDEs (the listings all fitted
> on a single sheet of paper and used black-and-white styling) and
> ideally a debugger so they could find mistakes by stepping through
> the code.  I also got students telling me that it was horribly
> unreasonable of me to expect them to read a 30-page manual; NOBODY
> could read that much.  And finding a definition of an identifier
> in a 2-page listing is just beyond human capacity; it's impossible
> to do that without the machine assistance of an IDE.
>


> So the whole experiment produced no worthwhile data for reasons having
> nothing to do with what I thought I was testing.
>

I strongly disagree, Mr. Fleming.  You got some very worthwhile data about
just how poorly-educated, poorly-motivated and maybe even lazy students are
in your neck of the woods.

It's not the data you set out to find with your experiment, but it remains
very important, worthwhile, even valuable data.  Many important discoveries
have happened in experiments that set out to find something entirely
different.

-- 
"Perhaps people don't believe this, but throughout all of the discussions of
entering China our focus has really been what's best for the Chinese people.
It's not been about our revenue or profit or whatnot."
--Sergey Brin, demonstrating the emptiness of the "don't be evil" mantra.
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