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From: The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: The joy of FORTRAN
Date: Wed, 2 Oct 2024 17:52:24 +0100
Organization: A little, after lunch
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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.



-- 
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as 
foolish, and by the rulers as useful.

(Seneca the Younger, 65 AD)