Old-School Coding Techniques You May Not Miss

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?"

Comments

Re:Some, not all...

[Blakey Rat]

I did a ton of work in THINK C 5 on Mac OS 7. Programming in C on a computer with no memory protection is something I never want to experience again. Misplace a single character, and it's reboot time-- for the 13th time today.

What's *really* weird is that at the time I didn't think that was particularly strange or difficult. It was just the way things were.

radio in the computer case

[bcrowell]

Circa 1984, when I did summer programming jobs at Digital Research (purveyors of CP/M), one of the programmers there showed me how you could put a transistor radio inside the case of your computer. You could tell what the computer was doing by listing to the sounds it picked up via the RF emissions from the computer. For instance, it would go into a certain loop, and you could tell because the radio would buzz like a fly.

Documentation was a lot harder to come by. If you wanted the documentation for X11, you could go to a big bookstore like Cody's in Berkeley, and they would have it in multiple hardcover volumes. Each volume was very expensive. The BSD documentation was available in the computer labs at UC Berkeley in the form of 6-foot-wide trays of printouts. (Unix man pages existed too, but since you were using an ADM3A terminal, it was often more convenient to walk over to the hardcopy.)

On the early microcomputers, there was no toolchain for programming other than MS BASIC in ROM. Assemblers and compilers didn't exist. Since BASIC was slow, if you wanted to write a fast program, you had to code it on paper in assembler and translate it by hand into machine code. But then in order to run your machine code, you were stuck because there was no actual operating system that would allow you to load it into memory from a peripheral such as a cassette tape drive. So you would first convert the machine code to a string of bytes expressed in decimal, and then write a BASIC program that would do a dummy assignment into a string variable like 10 A$="xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx". Then you would write self-modifying code in BASIC that would find the location where the string literal "xxx...." was stored, and overwrite it with your machine code. So now if you gave the LIST command, it would display the program on the screen, with the string literal displayed as goofy unprintable characters. Then you would code the program so it would execute the machine code stored at the address of the variable A$. Finally you'd save the program onto cassette.

swapping two values without a temporary variable

[domulys]

x = x xor y
y = x xor y
x = x xor y

Now you know!

True story

[Moraelin]

Let me tell you a true story to illustrate why I think people should still learn that stuff.

ACT I

So at one point I'm in a room with what looks like two particularly unproductive Wallys. Though it's probably unfair to call both Wally, since at least one looks like the hard working kind... he just makes as much progress as a courier on a treadmill.

So Wally 1 keeps clicking and staring at the screen all week and spewing things like "Unbelievable!" every 5 minutes. My curiosity gets the better of me and I ask what's happening.

"Look at this," goes Wally 1, and I indeed move over to see him toiling in the debugger through a Hashtable with String keys. He's looking at its bucket array, to be precise. "Java is broken! I added a new value with the same hash value for the key, and it just replaced my old one! Look, my old value was here, and now it's the new one!"

"Oh yes, we had that bug too at the former company I worked for," chimes in Wally 2. "We had to set the capacity manually to avoid it."

I clench my teeth to stop myself from screaming.

"Hmm," I play along, "expand that 'next' node, please."

"No, you don't understand, my value was here and now there's this other key there."

"Yes, but I want to see what's in that 'next' node, please."

So he clicks on it and goes, "Oh... There it is..."

Turns out that neither of them had the faintest fucking clue what a hash table is, or for that matter what a linked list is. They looked at its hash bucket and expected nothing deeper than that. And, I'm told, at least one of them had been in a project where they actually coded workarounds (that can't possibly do any difference, too!) for its normal operation.

ACT II

So I'm consulting at another project and essentially they use a HashMap with string keys too. Except they created their own key objects, nothing more than wrappers around a String, and with their own convoluted and IMHO suboptimal hash value calculation too. Hmm, they must have had a good reason, but I ask someone.

"Oh," he goes, "we ran into a Java bug. You can see it in the debugger. You'd add a new value whose key has the same hash value and it replaces yours in the array. So Ted came up with an own hash value, so it doesn't happen any more."

Ted was their architect, btw. There were easily over 20 of them merry retards in that project, including an architect, and neither of them understood:

A) that that's the way a hash table works, and more importantly

B) that it still worked that way even with Ted's idiotic workaround. It's mathematically impossible to code a hash there which doesn't cause the same collisions anyway, and sure enough Ted's produced them too.

ACT III

I'm talking to yet another project's architect, this time a framework, and, sure enough...

"Oh yeah, that's the workaround for a bug they found in project XYZ. See, Java's HashMap has a bug. It replaces your old value when you have a hash collision in the key."

AAARGH!

So I'm guessing it would still be useful if more people understood these things. We're not just talking abstract complaints about cargo-cult programming without understanding it. We're talking people and sometimes whole teams who ended up debugging into it when they had some completely unrelated bug, and spent time on it. And then spent more time coding "workarounds" which can't possibly even make any difference. And then spent more time fixing the actual bug they had in the first place.