19 Jun
2000
19 Jun
'00
8:38 p.m.
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.