Experience

This pilot fish is an experienced applications architect who's working with a young business analyst.

"One of the projects that the young BA needs to produce is an extract/report layout that is to be sent to a mainframe for storage in an archiving repository," fish says.

BA asks fish what format the extract should be in. Fish knows that it needs to be displayed on 3270-style terminal emulators and printed from the mainframe printers. He tells BA, "Use fixed-length lines, with the fields in fixed-width columns using a fixed-width font like Courier."

No problem, replies the young BA.

A little later, fish sees the young BA crafting a mock report layout using a graphical editing package.

The headers are in 14-point Courier. The subheaders are 12-point Courier. The report detail is 10-point Courier. Each field is entered as a separate text string, and its position is specified by an X/Y pixel offset.

That's when fish suddenly realizes that the young BA has never seen a line printer or used a green screen-terminal. The BA's whole experience has been in a proportional-font GUI world.

"I feel so old," sighs fish.

"It's difficult to explain to the young BA that the whole report must use the same size font throughout, and even the spaces between the columns must be a fixed number of spaces, and that all that hard work with a GUI editor could have been done so much quicker with Notepad."

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