Re: The joy of FORTRAN

On Fri, 28 Feb 2025 09:42:15 -0800, John Ames wrote:

On Fri, 28 Feb 2025 07:55:08 -0500 c186282 <c186282@nnada.net> wrote:
 

The 'configurable' stuff ... sometimes you get a sort of next-level
idea that SOUNDS great, but by the time you really get into it then it
WOULD be just easier to write one-off reports or whatever.

 
There's probably a corollary to Zawinski's Law about programs expanding
to the point where every behavior is configurable (except the one thing
you really *need* to configure...)

We had some legacy programs that had grown over the years. When a new
interface was needed someone would decide it was sort of like the one in
the existing code. After 20 years it became a Swiss army knife and it was
hard to tell what it was doing.

I preferred to clone a similar interface and modify it for the new
requirements, reusing most of the boilerplate. It resulted in a
proliferation of programs rather than the OneProgramToRuleThemAll, but
disk space in the code tree stopped being an issue a long time ago.