Programming on Paper

From: Craig Smith <ip500_at_roanoke.infi.net>
Date: Mon Jun 19 19:38:12 2000

Now that brings back some memories! 1969-72 at Franklin Pierce College
writing assembly and Fortran IV stuff for a 360/60 that we timeshared
with a bunch of other schools. I/O was a Teletype machine with a
cardpunch and reader hooked up to it. The good old days??? I don't think
so! You've never know true Hell until you drop a huge deck of cards
you've worked on for a week. Craig
> >
> >: It is possible to write perfect, bug-free code. I've seen
> >: it done, with no tool except a pencil. The essential ingredient
> >: is a decision, by the individual programmer, to make the code
> >: perfect, and not to release it until it is perfect.
>
> The caveat is that all of the "perfect" coders I know, wrote in assembly
> language, which has very little ambiguity. I owe much of my coding skill to
> a single mid level class on plotting. Two stinking credits, and one of the
> hardest most time consuming classes I have ever taken, with a drop out rate
> close to 75%. The title was plotting, but it was all about writing
> optimized code in assembly language to be called by a fortran program
> running on a IBM 360 with output on some little flatbed plotter. Each of
> the half dozen projects reused code from the previous, and by the end we
> all had shoebox sized stacks of punched cards, and a VERY keen eye on what
> made good code.
>
> It was really many years later into my professional career that I learned
> to "spill some blood" and let the compiler find a few errors instead of
> spending so much time actually writing the initial code.
Received on Mon Jun 19 2000 - 19:38:12 BST