Re: The joy of FORTRAN

On 2 Oct 2024 22:06:15 GMT, rbowman wrote:

On Wed, 02 Oct 2024 17:29:30 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
 

On 2024-10-02, The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
 

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.

 
    Adding manpower to a late project makes it later.
      -- Fred Brooks

 
That should be required reading for every manager. Of course they will
say "but that was then..."

One of his concrete numbers was that, in a large project, each programmer
can only come up with around ten lines of reasonably production-quality
code per day.

I saw some figures on the Linux kernel once, mentioning it had around a
thousand active contributors, and Linus was at that time merging 10-12,000
lines of new/changed code per day. That worked out at 10-12 lines per
contributor per day, quite close to Brooks’ measure.

His prediction about “metaprogramming” being the next leap forward in
productivity did come true, though his example of AppleScript as the kind
of thing he meant turned out to be somewhat off.

iirc the cover art was the LaBrea tar pits

Fun question: what does “la brea” mean?