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