APL\360

[Fred Cisin]

> Whenever I start a new job the first thing I do today is enable
> -Werror; all warnings are errors. And I’ll fix every one. Even
> when everyone claims that “These are not a problem”. Before
> that existed, I’d do the same with lint, and FlexeLint when I
> could get it.

On Fri, 29 Jan 2021, wrcooke at wrcooke.net wrote:
> That's exactly what I did and was then told I was likely to get fired for
> it.  I left that job soon after.
> "A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new." -- Albert
> Einstein


Similarly, "You don't have time to write comments as you go along.  You 
can go back and add them in AFTER the program is working."  Of course, as 
soon as it "seems to be working", "We're not paying you to mess with stuff 
that's already DONE.  We have ANOTHER project that you have to get on 
immediately."

It's not good to be in a job where they won't let you be thorough in error 
checking nor let you write comments.


And, of course, "Don't waste space with more than two decimal digits for 
year.  NOTHING that we are doing now will still be in use 30 years from 
now."


One of the tasks that I was assigned (working for a contractor at GSFC) 
was to work on converting a wall of punch-card subroutines for plotting on 
Calcomp plotters that needed to be changed to work on Stromberg-Carlson 
(later Stromberg Datagraphics).  It was budgeted for a LONG project to 
rewrite all of them.  I realized that all of the subroutines for Calcomp 
called lower and lower level routines, on down to a small number of 
primitives.  It was easy to write primitives for those lowest level ones, 
that worked on the SC/SD.  I got some help with the JCL to link my 
primitives to the routines for the Calcomps.  All of the routines for 
Calcomp worked fine calling their lower level routines, and ultimately 
calling MY primitives.  The company got a small bonus for getting it all 
done way sooner than planned, and I got a private major reprimand for 
getting it all done way sooner than it was budgeted for.  Many others 
earned bonuses for the company.  The company distributed the bonuses as 
BIG bonuses to upper executives (I think that the top guy got a car), and 
gave each of us a gift certificate/coupon for a turkey.