>Well, let's see. There was the strange analogy about water skiing and me showing up with fins on. Yes, I take that as insulting. Then there was him saying "if you STILL do not get it", which is also insulting. And then there was his explanation of what the thread is about. As if no one can have their own interpretation or emphasis within a thread. Happens all the time, but Thomas has to tell me how I have deviated from his concept of the thread. These are examples of a condescending and arrogant attitude. I'm sure you'd agree you don't have to use four letter words to insult someone.
>
>But I prefer to lay it out and so I pointed out his arrogance. Besides the above, I based that on his "proof" that he seems to have so carefully laid out. He deems me "proved wrong", but in all his cleverness, he did not compare apples to apples. I appreciate the fact that he needs to eek out the last little bit of performance in his app and if I was in his situation, I would also look for each microsecond, but I don't appreciate his tendency to imply "if you're not doing it my way, you're doing it the wrong way." And if he's going to work so hard at "proving me wrong", but then disregard one of the basic tenants of scientific analysis, then I guess you'll have to forgive me if discount his opinion.
>
>>I agree with all of that. I would like to point out that there is value in trying to come to a consensus about granularity, UDFs etc. We can only get that by putting aside our emotions - something else Star Trek taught me about life! ;)
>
>And I agree with that. I also feel it's important not to talk down to people. One thing I have noticed too much here is a tendency to nitpick. Once we get our skills to a certain level, yet we still find differences in coding choices, we need to learn to be more forgiving and less judgemental. There are legitimate arguments on many issues, yet some of those issues that people find time to argue about often don't amount to much when it comes down to it. The sniping over some things is just that - sniping - not engineering or science or whatever grandiose term someone wants to apply.
>
>Now, you take the guy one of my clients hired recently. Claimed to be an "intermediate" VFP programmer. Later found out he didn't know what data normalization was. Also found out that he loved to copy and paste. He created one form that had 48 of the same controls on it and in each one of those controls he had placed the same code. Once he took a form of mine that printed a report, made a copy of it and used it to print another report. I made him take my form, add a parameter and maybe a control on the form to choose an additional option, and let that form handle both reports. Worked great. (Luckily all his code had to pass through me, so I sent him back to the drawing board a good bit.) And then once he came to me with months worth of work on forms to handle managing some documents his employee maintains. It was very heavily hard coded and not normalized. So I had to sit down and draw up a properly normalized design and show him how the task could be handled in a
>data-driven manner that drastically cut down on the maintenance chore and put much more control in the hands of the users. These are the things that we know are demonstrably wrong, but, as I said, sometimes there is nitpicking over things that aren't as important as the nitpicker wants to believe. That irritates me. Naomi was able to point out an improvement in my code (that I hadn't looked at in quite awhile <g>) and I've made that change. But Thomas came across very differently and so I let him know I thought he was being arrogant.
>
>That programmer I mentioned and others like him need help in improving their skills (and we all need to try to do that on a consistent basis), but we are not going to get them to come here or places like it when what they find is condescension and arrogance. They will just leave and our industry will be worse off because of it. Let's just make sure that when we sit around trying to engineer something to the last little nth degree, that we also remember that our own preferences, biases, and requirements are often engineered into that solution. With that in mind, we can hopefully avoid the condescension when we find someone else doing in the "wrong" way. Some things are really, really wrong. Some things are only wrong because some programmer sees another programmer doing something differently and just deems it wrong.

Now I agree with you as well :)

How can both be right at the same time? :)