Drive-By Programmer

Are you a drive-by programmer?

What this means to your colleagues is that you just offer a suggestion to fix their code and move on. In order to get new programmers to use UniBasic you have to spend the time teaching, critiquing, suggesting and even writing a snippet of code to help them get over the hump or the might just get another job outside of Universe, Unidata, D3, or QM (U2).

Teaching those junior programmers and even senior programmers who think they know it all requires understanding what they are doing and where they want their code to do. Additionally, you must show them what tools are available to make their job easier and more productive.

Junior programmers probably have heard and used Visual Studio and want a tool that allows them to learn and grow on the job and we have that with Eclipse IDE for U2. Once they see their compile errors as the type, or hitting F3 to see what these includes are they will be much more of a productive U2 programmer. Maybe after we have taught them that every variable in U2 is global in scope and they have not passed out or told you how crazy that is, you can show them in Eclipse IDE Outline at what line number these variables are used at.

Senior programmer can be shown that using line editor or full-screen editor where they have to either a telnet session running in background or have to FTP the source code back the database, that there is a better way. With Eclipse IDE you can directly edit your source code on the database without all of that hassle and be able to produce code much faster and cleaner.

Whether you are a junior or senior programmer saving off all programs at BP.OLD or with a prefix like MYPROGRAM.0415216 is such a poor way of handling changes that we look like we started coding the in the 1980's. Oh, we did. Version control using GIT, TFS, SVN, CVS, or whatever is the way to go. Even within Eclipse IDE there is history of all of your changes throughout the day so you can even go back to the 9 am version at 4:30 pm.

A trial license of XLr8Editor for U2logic or U2 is available for free.