Re: The joy of FORTRAN

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.