I most certainly have dreamed in B&W. I grew up with B&W TV - didn't have a color one in our house till I was halfway through high school. I haven't paid attention to it in a few years but I have certainly dreamed in B&W for most of my adult life.
What amazes me is how successful this architecture has been when it is such a looser design.
Certainly, a lot of good stuff has been thrown in over the decades, and on the balance, the Pentium architecture - all in all - is pretty good. But the 8086 was a bad attempt at compatibility with the 808 and those compatibility compromises have led to problems then and now.
Motorola's 68000 architecture was much more efficient and easy to design for, but 1) they didn't do marketing as well as Intel has, and 2) they didn't win the competition for the IBM PC - a competition no one could have known would be as significant as it was.
I have seen so many examples of this where the better technical solution lost out to the one that was better marketed.
I know that many math topics that were in standard math courses in the 70's are now AP (advanced placement) material. In the private, Christian school my kids attended, they worked really hard to keep the standards up. Parents then started to complain that their kids were not scoring as high as they had in public school.
So the school changed grading for tougher courses without changing the difficulty of exams or the content of the classes.
I don't think kids are dumber. I do believe the time spent watching TV and playing video games has a negative impact on intellectual curiosity and on creativity. But I think the key factor is that we expect less of the kids and more of the system. There is a new sense among parents that, not only are their kids, on average, above average but that any failings are the fault of the system (teacher's not paid well, NCLB issues, unions, etc.). IMO, most of the fault sits squarely on parents. If they expect more and hold their own kids accountable, then the kids will do better regardless of all the rest.
Certainly there are tools as clueless as the one you mention and certainly there are bosses that are equally clueless, but methinks you were burned somewhere along the way and that has swayed your thinking.
IMO, these tools have come a long way. The ones I have used provide a lot of useful information. The better ones can be taught or told to ignore certain rules and can have new rules added that apply to a specific product or organization.
I remember using lint early in my career and using a tool another engineer had written that could be used to ignore certain messages and could also diff the output of lint so that you could see what messages were different from a previous run. Lint was far less intelligent than what I have used recently and yet it was still useful. In fact, because it was free to use it, almost free to run it, the only cost was the time to process the output. In our group, we decided to get our code to pass lint (with the modifications shown above) before we compiled (I actually would do them in parallel). Back them, the cc compiler (using K&R C) didn't flag many errors at all.
So, my bias now is to get some good tools and run them religiously. The challenge, as you say, is in how you handle the output. That decision should be left up to the developer or to the development team - never the manager.
My $.02.
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I most certainly have dreamed in B&W. I grew up with B&W TV - didn't have a color one in our house till I was halfway through high school. I haven't paid attention to it in a few years but I have certainly dreamed in B&W for most of my adult life.
What amazes me is how successful this architecture has been when it is such a looser design.
Certainly, a lot of good stuff has been thrown in over the decades, and on the balance, the Pentium architecture - all in all - is pretty good. But the 8086 was a bad attempt at compatibility with the 808 and those compatibility compromises have led to problems then and now.
Motorola's 68000 architecture was much more efficient and easy to design for, but 1) they didn't do marketing as well as Intel has, and 2) they didn't win the competition for the IBM PC - a competition no one could have known would be as significant as it was.
I have seen so many examples of this where the better technical solution lost out to the one that was better marketed.
I know that many math topics that were in standard math courses in the 70's are now AP (advanced placement) material. In the private, Christian school my kids attended, they worked really hard to keep the standards up. Parents then started to complain that their kids were not scoring as high as they had in public school. So the school changed grading for tougher courses without changing the difficulty of exams or the content of the classes. I don't think kids are dumber. I do believe the time spent watching TV and playing video games has a negative impact on intellectual curiosity and on creativity. But I think the key factor is that we expect less of the kids and more of the system. There is a new sense among parents that, not only are their kids, on average, above average but that any failings are the fault of the system (teacher's not paid well, NCLB issues, unions, etc.). IMO, most of the fault sits squarely on parents. If they expect more and hold their own kids accountable, then the kids will do better regardless of all the rest.
Certainly there are tools as clueless as the one you mention and certainly there are bosses that are equally clueless, but methinks you were burned somewhere along the way and that has swayed your thinking. IMO, these tools have come a long way. The ones I have used provide a lot of useful information. The better ones can be taught or told to ignore certain rules and can have new rules added that apply to a specific product or organization. I remember using lint early in my career and using a tool another engineer had written that could be used to ignore certain messages and could also diff the output of lint so that you could see what messages were different from a previous run. Lint was far less intelligent than what I have used recently and yet it was still useful. In fact, because it was free to use it, almost free to run it, the only cost was the time to process the output. In our group, we decided to get our code to pass lint (with the modifications shown above) before we compiled (I actually would do them in parallel). Back them, the cc compiler (using K&R C) didn't flag many errors at all. So, my bias now is to get some good tools and run them religiously. The challenge, as you say, is in how you handle the output. That decision should be left up to the developer or to the development team - never the manager. My $.02.