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From: @RUTGERS.ARPA:LINDSAY@TL-20A.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.works
Subject: grisly grizzled programs
Message-ID: <596@topaz.ARPA>
Date: Tue, 12-Feb-85 14:13:52 EST
Article-I.D.: topaz.596
Posted: Tue Feb 12 14:13:52 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 14-Feb-85 00:59:16 EST
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Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
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From: LINDSAY@TL-20A.ARPA

This post is rated "PG". Seventeen years ago, I was hacking in half-a-
dozen or more languages, so I volunteer to be the adult that leads you
through the following thicket:

> 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.
> 
> 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.

Summary: No we didn't.

1) Coding was such a damn pain that programs were never cleaned up, and were
left alone as much as possible. Now, programs have a lot more polish.

2) Allow me to point out that Unix's early popularity was due to "ed" and
"nroff".  Bell Labs embraced Unix as a way to ( get this ) document. In the
Good Old Days we had secretaries type up our chicken scratchings. Maybe.
Perhaps we would draw a flowchart. The comments were lousy (see point 1).

3) We didn't know beans about modularity. Dijkstra's ideas came later. Parnas'
ideas about information hiding came later. Most programmers had learned by
doing maintenance on the most ******** **** you ever saw.  Mostly they'd never
met anyone good to learn from.

4) I didn't learn discipline from waiting around.  I learned it from others,
and from projects that couldn't have their correctness tested in, and from
working on things too big to keep entirely in my head (note point 3, above). 
I learned quite a lot, and I recommend the attitude that there's more to learn.

							Don Lindsay
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