30 Oct
2011
30 Oct
'11
10:19 a.m.
Toby Thain [toby at telegraphics.com.au]:
Are there common things that a programmer waits for?
Reminds me of a discussion that I had with Greg Mansfield, then of
Cray sometime around 1983. We were discussing mods to Unix (I, BSD
for the VAX; he, UniCOS) and I happened to mention that maintiang the
makefiles and integrity of partial builds was a bit of a burden. He
responded that he didn't bother with partial builds--he just
recompiled the whole thing every time.
After all, he was running on some very fast hardware. Indeed, even
today, I'll find myself wondering what the heck I'm doing working out
a makefile for a project whose compilation time is a minute at worst.
And I agree--time spent away from the damned box is probably more
important than time spent in front of it in the development process.
For me, time spent sleeping seems to be my most productive time I
find that designing software when fatigued results in many mistakes
and foggy thought.
My most valuable development tool remains a quadrule pad and a
pencil.
My most valuable lesson learned is *never* give in to management
pressure to cut development time on a project. We all could take
lessons from Michaelangelo there.
--Chuck