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Old-School Coding Techniques You May Not Miss

Posted by samzenpus on from the good-riddance dept.

CWmike writes "Despite its complexity, the software development process has gotten better over the years. 'Mature' programmers remember manual intervention and hand-tuning. Today's dev tools automatically perform complex functions that once had to be written explicitly. And most developers are glad of it. Yet, young whippersnappers may not even be aware that we old fogies had to do these things manually. Esther Schindler asked several longtime developers for their top old-school programming headaches and added many of her own to boot. Working with punch cards? Hungarian notation?"

3 of 731 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Hungarian Notation by smellotron · · Score: 5, Informative

    And the language type is rarely interesting- I want to know that the variable outsideTemp holds degrees farenheit, not that it's an integer. But Hungarian doesn't tell me that

    Good Hungarian notation does exactly that, actually. Check out Apps Hungarian, which encodes the semantic type of the data, rather than the language-level data type.

    Of course stupid Hungarian notation is stupid. Stupid anything is stupid. Problem is, most people don't hear about the right approach.

  2. Re:Fortran implicit integers by Geirzinho · · Score: 5, Informative

    Nonsense, it's simply because i - n commonly is used to denote integer variables (sum x_i from 1 to n) i mathematical notation. This is a practice dating back at least to Gauss.

  3. Premature optimizations by IntentionalStance · · Score: 5, Informative

    This is one of my favourite quotes:

    "The First Rule of Program Optimization: Don't do it. The Second Rule of Program Optimization (for experts only!): Don't do it yet." - Michael A. Jackson

    That being said, when I hit the experts only situation I can usually get 2 orders of magnitude improvement in speed. I just then have to spend the time to document the hell out of it so that the next poor bastard who maintains the code can understand what on earth I've done. Especially given that all too often I am this poor bastard.