Programming on Paper (was Re: Apple III motherboard)

From: Douglas Quebbeman <dhquebbeman_at_theestopinalgroup.com>
Date: Mon Jun 19 12:12:53 2000

> > > From: Douglas Quebbeman <dhquebbeman_at_theestopinalgroup.com>
> > > Since I compose
> > > to paper (and still do and cannot understand why some
> > > programmers compose directly into thr machine),
>
> You do that too? I always got more code written in a shorter period
> of time that way. When modifying code, paper is all the more useful,
> particularly wide greenbar with the code to be modified or added to
> printed out on it. My former employer had no printer with greenbar,
> which really came as a shock to me, as every place else I'd ever
> worked had at least one high-speed line printer. It's too annoying to
> make changes to long programs on the screen; much easier to leaf
> through pages of code and pencil in changes, draw lines here and
> there, circle things, etc. than to go from screen to screen with an
> editor, as that can become confusing with large programs. No wonder
> modern code has become so bloated and full of bugs; the programmers
> have less of an idea what they're working on.

I'm bidding on a DECwriter III so that I can have something I can
load greenbar into on the Prime; I also bought a wide-carriage
Imagewriter for the same reason. That gives me a backup, I guess.

Greenbar's going for about $30 per box these days.

> Even stranger was the fact that most of the people I worked with, who
> were programmers, had no idea what greenbar was, even when it was
> described to them!

Yeah, the phrase "line printer" will probably elicit as much
of a furrowed brow from these newbies as would "unit record".
 
> Hopefully line printers and wide dot-matrix printers aren't on their
> way to becoming obsolete.

Well, both printers alluded to above were found on E-Bay, so they
must be rare.... :-)

-dq
Received on Mon Jun 19 2000 - 12:12:53 BST