Thursday, October 25, 2007

Programming Through Time

When I first started programming, the days of batch programming, I used punched cards as an input to the computer. The turn around time for a compile was 24 hours. Soon I moved to time sharing on a PDP 11 having 512 K memory, and a 40 MB disk the turn around time for a compile and link for a 3000 line COBOL program was around an hour. In those days I would draw a flow chart or HIPO diagram, or pseudo code then hand write the code, hand run them, enter them through the editor, print it out go through the printout to correct any entry errors and then compile, link and test it.
Computing speeds have grown be leaps and bound, my desktop is now much more powerful than what I had used in the past. A compile of a similar program would now take a few seconds.
Now I find that given program specifications programmers open the IDE and start coding the program.
Was I doing something wrong earlier by spend so much effort rather than wrting the program directly in the editor?

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Reliable Software

Is software really reliable?