I can see exactly where Charles went wrong. Here is how the story should have gone:
Charles implements an entire interpreted language with garbage collection and an incomprehensibly coded virtual machine. Everything is documented and works flawlessly at that level, however. Nary a bug can be found by anyone experimenting with the language.
Charles writes the program in 30 lines of this language, which appear fairy simple on the surface, but rely on some deep semantics (that Alan's team doesn't even comprehend, for instance, let alone management, without studying).
In this case, nobody can dismiss the problem as being something easy that a junior programmer can solve, and Alan's team look like troglodytes from the Dark Ages.
All the more so because their buggy, incomplete program is
over 2500 lines, while Charles' language fits into 2300.
Charles implements an entire interpreted language with garbage collection and an incomprehensibly coded virtual machine. Everything is documented and works flawlessly at that level, however. Nary a bug can be found by anyone experimenting with the language.
Charles writes the program in 30 lines of this language, which appear fairy simple on the surface, but rely on some deep semantics (that Alan's team doesn't even comprehend, for instance, let alone management, without studying).
In this case, nobody can dismiss the problem as being something easy that a junior programmer can solve, and Alan's team look like troglodytes from the Dark Ages. All the more so because their buggy, incomplete program is over 2500 lines, while Charles' language fits into 2300.
:)