Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/5/84; site terak.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxr!mhuxb!mhuxn!mhuxm!mhuxj!houxm!whuxlm!akgua!sdcsvax!dcdwest!ittvax!decvax!genrad!panda!talcott!harvard!seismo!hao!noao!terak!doug From: doug@terak.UUCP (Doug Pardee) Newsgroups: net.works Subject: Re: "look for bugs" Message-ID: <340@terak.UUCP> Date: Wed, 6-Feb-85 12:09:04 EST Article-I.D.: terak.340 Posted: Wed Feb 6 12:09:04 1985 Date-Received: Sun, 10-Feb-85 04:44:00 EST References: <524@topaz.ARPA> Organization: Terak Corporation, Scottsdale, AZ, USA Lines: 47 ----------- This commentary is rated "R". It contains subject matter which is considered heretical by anyone with less than 17 years experience, and less experienced readers must be accompanied by a grizzled old-timer. ----------- > I agree with Charlie Levy's statement that most of the programmers time > is spent in his step 3a looking for bugs. This situation should alarm > us as computer scientists. Our current "programming environments", which > today are barely more than good operating systems, are not doing the job. > > Programming tools which automate design and bug detection are greatly needed. I can give you a very good reason why programmers spend so much time looking for bugs. You're staring at it right now. The interactive terminal connected to a timesharing system. Waaaay back in "the good old days", we used to get *ONE* crack at running our programs each day. (You will recall, perhaps, that an IBM 360/40 was considered a mainframe, but it was slower than an Apple ][). Programs were punched on cards, and listed off-line on equipment such as the IBM 407 accounting machine. We produced more programs, bigger programs, and better programs, under those conditions than programmers do under current conditions. But it wasn't as much "fun" because we didn't get to play with the computer very much. We didn't spend much time debugging. We spent our time preventing bugs. Not: "Oh I see the problem, I'll just change this a little bit and try it again... Oh damn it still didn't work, *now* what's wrong?" Instead it was "Does this code still make sense? What can I think of that would cause it to freak out? Can that happen?" It wasn't unusual at all to find and fix ten or more bugs each day, without a computer run. And since there was plenty of time to work on the program, the fixes were done right instead of kludging. There was no inducement to produce half-baked programs (have you looked at the "BUGS" section of the UNIX(tm) manual pages? Why hasn't somebody FIXED those after all these years?) OK, enough history lesson. The moral is that programmers will spend a lot of time debugging if they don't take the time to prevent bugs. And that means time reviewing the PROGRAM, away from the computer. -- Doug Pardee -- Terak Corp. -- !{hao,ihnp4,decvax}!noao!terak!doug