Re: The joy of FORTRAN

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 .........