Re: The joy of FORTRAN

On Fri, 28 Feb 2025 12:42:57 -0700, Peter Flass wrote:

I used to be able to crank out assembler mostly as fast as I could write
(or type), with some thought required for the tricky bits. C is not
really faster for me to write, or wasn’t when I was doing a bunch of
it.

But a line of C typically does a whole lot more than a line of assembler.
That is where the productivity gain comes from.

Fred Brooks, author of the classic “The Mythical Man-Month”, worked this
out years ago: once a code base reaches a certain size, your typical
experienced programmer, familiar with the project, is only able to
contribute about ten lines of reasonably-debugged code per day. And that
applies across a whole range of different languages.

This is why very-high-level languages, which can do a whole lot more in a
single line of code, offer greater productivity than assembler.