The most honest physicist I met told me he went into headhunting after
some years because he realized he would always be mediocre compared to
the elite physicists. I've met one or two software types who would have
been brilliant had they followed their majors and gone into chemistry or
engineering but they would have been poorer. Another who dropped out of
highschool at age fourteen to program a mainframe full-time. The school
board gave permission because it was their mainframe. None of these
people had a way with words but they expressed themselves very clearly
with a small vocabulary. Had theirs been bigger, I am certain they
would have found that unnecessary for the purposes they chose.
When I complained about a technical developer's contradictory memos, I
was told that he didn't go to university to learn English. Same group,
averaging more than two degrees per person, mostly North American plus a
Russian or two, wrote 140 page design document for a very limited GUI
translator, after being asked for ten. A quick scan was enough to see
it was pure gibberish. Company president claimed he had mastered it all
in 90 minutes and would fund it. His major had been basketball. I told
him I wouldn't read it until they told me which page the design was on.
Asked where the engine was, he turned around to the flunkies and said
"Well, where's the engine?".
That problem was an order or two of magnitude smaller than the one Codd
took eleven pages to describe in 1970 but which created a sensation
within the small audience it got then. Yet Codd was said by some to
write obscurely. Date gets deserved credit for his breadth of
theoretical and practical knowledge. I would say just as much is due to
his ability to express himself clearly (except for the Latin, of course).
