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Subject: Re: The joy of FORTRAN
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On 10/2/24 12:52 PM, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
> On 02/10/2024 17:29, rbowman wrote:
>> On Wed, 2 Oct 2024 11:06:31 +0100, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>>
>>> The cost benefit is against the top down "we will write the whole
>>> detailed spec before we write a line of code" idea  that in my
>>> experience is actually worse.
>>
>> I worked on one project like that, endless meetings arguing over 
>> paragraph
>> headings. I left after six months out of boredom. I'd been doing some
>> moonlighting for another employee who had his own thing going. The next
>> spring when I talked to him about my tax documents I asked if they'd
>> written any code yet. The answer was 'no'. It was a DoD project so you 
>> can
>> understand the cost overruns and poor results.
>>
>> The danger is after so much time and money is spent preparing the spec it
>> will be implemented even if problems are found. A whole chain of managers
>> that signed off on it aren't going to admit there is a problem.
> 
> My nemesis was Z notastion  It was software for an undersea optical 
> fibre repeater, based on an 8086 IIRC.
> 
> It was a year behind and in a complete mess, so they hired hundreds of 
> programmer, not one of whom knew what they were supposed to be doing. 
> There was one guy there who could code hardware and I reckoned if it had 
> been us two, we would have thrown away the specs and RMX 86 and done  it 
> bare metal  in 6 months.
> 
> What had happened is that some wanker of a compsci had decided to write 
> the spec in something called I think Z notation, and then had blindly 
> tried to map that onto a functional spec, and then I think he had left 
> before the shit hit the fan.
> 
> I spent a miserable 6 months and produced nothing of any worth because 
> no one could tell me what my bit was supposed to actually do.,
> 
> All the project needed was to draw up a basics state machine to decide 
> what actions to take against the limited number of inputs, and pretty 
> much have a main loop polling all the inputs, and twiddling the output 
> bits.  No real time OS, no preemptive multitasking nothing complex. Just 
> a state machine that said 'if  the inputs are like this, do that' for 
> around 128 cases.


   All the 'specs' stuff - that's so the know-nothing
   org bureaucrats can pretend to be In Charge and justify
   their paychecks.

   The horrible truth, of course, is that anything beyond
   a "general idea of" is a waste of time. You NEVER know
   how/where things are gonna go until the actual code
   and/or hardware is actually being made. Then there are
   all the sudden, oft incompatible, revisions and features
   everyone demands .........