Sorry, I should have used a smiley on that one.  :-)  I have nothing against 
mentoring, and mentoring is indeed an important skill, and I have benefitted 
greatly from it.  I've also tried to be a mentor at times, which is not to 
say I'm particularly good at it!  :-)  To clarify, my beef with Extreme 
Programming (XP) is that they preach that we should ONLY program in pairs.  
That would get old quick.  But, yes, mentoring would be a good way to take 
care of morons by converting them into good programmers.

By the way, here's that like about the killer software.  It was embedded in 
the Therac-25 radiation machine, which was manufactured by a Canadian 
company, and was responsible for several deaths in both the U.S. and Canada 
in the 1980's:  http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~muffy/papers/HIS1.ps.

Vaughn

On Tuesday 27 May 2003 11:57, you wrote:
> On Tue, 27 May 2003, Vaughn Treude wrote:
> > Another option (I almost hate to suggest it, because the concept
> > seems pretty noxious to a "cowboy programmer" like me), might be to use
> > the "pair programming" approach pushed by the Extreme Programming
> > methodology. This could have a lot of value in the early stages of one's
> > employment and/or contract.  Of course, I'm assuming you have enough
> > competent developers to act as mentors for the new ones.  :-)
>
> I have no experience with "pair programming,"
> but I had a mentor when I started working and
> it was good.
>
> Being a good mentor is hard; one has to allocate
> time learning about mentoring.
>
> To an extent, a local user group such as PLUG
> plays the role of a mentor.
>
> Here is a quote from UCLA professor Phil Agre.
>
> "Knowledge lives in communities, not individuals.
>  A computer user who's not part of a community of
>  computer users is going to have a harder time of
>  it than one who is."
>
> How to help someone use a computer
> http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/how-to-help.html
>
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