Re: The joy of FORTRAN

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)