Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!hplabs!sdcrdcf!trwrb!desint!geoff
From: geoff@desint.UUCP (Geoff Kuenning)
Newsgroups: comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: Cynic's Guide to Software Engineering, part 3
Message-ID: <1728@desint.UUCP>
Date: 7 May 88 07:28:08 GMT
References: <5752@well.UUCP> <985@nuchat.UUCP> <5879@well.UUCP>
Reply-To: geoff@desint.UUCP (Geoff Kuenning)
Distribution: na
Organization: Interrupt Technology Corp., Manhattan Beach, CA
Lines: 19

In article <5879@well.UUCP> shf@well.UUCP (Stuart H. Ferguson) writes:

> I wrote in an apparant defense of Fortran partly because it's one of
> those languages that programmers snicker about even though they
> themselves have never written a line of Fortran code.
...
> >A skilled and disciplined programmer can produce high quality
> >programs in any language.  No language can prevent poor code.

While this is technically true, it ignores a very important issue:
productivity.  I have sitting on my shelf a foot-thick listing of a
real-time control system written in Fortran;  about 80% of the code
was written by me.  The code is some of the best I've ever done.  But
if I had been allowed to do the project in C, Bliss, or another
language that had data structures, I would have finished it in 30%
less time.  (If I'd been allowed to use a Vax instead of a PDP-11,
I would have saved another 40%, but that's another issue).
-- 
	Geoff Kuenning   geoff@ITcorp.com   {uunet,trwrb}!desint!geoff