I don't think you understand the study

I didn't RTFA because I could tell from the summary that it was a lot of nonsense.

or c++

I understand enough about C++ to know to avoid it wherever possible. I freely admit that my brain isn't big enough to fight against C++ with enough perseverance to get it to do anything useful correctly. I'll stick to C and scripting languages thank you very much.

or unit testing.

*cough* Test Driven Development *cough*

To become half way good at C++ you either need to devote you entire life to it over decades (somewhat like a monk) or have an IQ of at least 200. Life's too short and my IQ is miles too low.

Why not just say that you should always build against the latest official working source before checkin? It has nothing to do with unit testing.

It does. You shouldn't be putting in new logic bugs with your deliveries. The code should compile cleanly and you should do due diligence to avoid putting in new bugs.

Bugs are expensive to fix, in terms of debugging time and refactoring of broken code to change additional changes built on top of the broken code.

It's amazing how much real progress you can make if you follow these simple rules.

And of course everyone always builds with the same configuration, same compiler, on the same platform.

Yes, they should, and it should be scripted so that it's trivial so that there's no excuse for not doing it every single time.

Multiple compilers, multiple OSes and multiple binary architectures should all be used and they should all be available to every developer on the network. There should be enough network, storage and CPU capacity to make the builds quick so that there is no excuse for not doing them.

How does a unit test prevent a build error?

Because you have to build your code to run the unit test. The two are (should be) intimately linked. And you should always be building against the latest official working source from the upstream repo.

When in CS, I had a prof that had one rule that for release (not beta/alpha/dev) code, if the code had even a single warning, it was unshippable unless there was an extremely good reason (which would be part of the README) of why it happened. Yes, this was a PITA, but he was trying to teach something that seems to have been lost.

You should be compiling with warnings as errors as soon as you start coding, and you should fix each one as they occur before you move on to write the next line of code.

Putting off fixing these problems leads to bloated and fragile code and wastes much more time debugging and fixing later.

I worked on features that let Visual Studio talk to SAP.

Well, that explains the rest of your post.

Oops.

What's to escalate? When the schedule flat out doesn't work, and your calls to customer service get handed over to a customer svc agent's voice mail, unless they want to talk to you, and they don't... that was what happened with us, I have no idea what happened with them... escalate doesn't help.

what part of this am I not getting?

It's a sign of the times.

Most people just do a "sudo apt-get install" now or click on "Install" in the update manager.

FOSS is mature in that it has a boring, straight-laced, conformist main-stream that caters to 99.9% of the public's needs with unsurprising conventional applications.

We have become institutionalised and the cutting edge has been blunted.

Now? I really won't bother building Windowmaker applets or LibSpinyEchidna.so from source. :-)

I would, if only I had the time these days.

In fact I have some teency tiny scripts for making WINGs into a shared library. I half-wrote a calculator application using it about 8 years ago.

Still using WindowMaker, on Slackware64, but I install the binary package, I don't build from source :-)

Irony upon irony. We're getting this list from a Communist nation

A Communist country where people can own companies and trade stocks and shares?

Actually, it isn't quite that. Tenure at universities is part of academic freedom, which in turn is there to protect the deans from white elephants, such as a ten-million dollar donation with strings that the teachers must teach whoositztheory, or that they must not teach whassis to undergrads.

Thing is, donaters love strings. That's why they donate; and if the donation is turned down, then the bigwig works hard to destroy the one who turned it down.

Universities evolved the fiction of academic freedom (and the attendant tenure) to combat that. Typically speaking, at primary and secondary schools that isn't a problem at that level: bigwigs take it to the state government.

It is not the same in EVERY Virginia city, but in Norfolk whenI was a taxi driver, the city licensed a cetin number of cabs to operate. Like the commercial fisherman's license, if you had a license, you had every incentive NOT to operate a vehicle, but to rent it out to a licensed cabdriver for a rental fee of more than $100 per day. That's 1992 dollars.

Moreover, your incentive to maintain a working vehicle was almost minimal. So they were real pieces of trash, that harvested money from poor cabbies and poorer clientele, and redirected it into the pockets of the owner of each cab company.

That's the Virginia way of doing things. YMMV.