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

Wasnt that old

[gmuslera]

I tought that Schindler's List was from the 40's, but this one seems a bit more recent.

it's even really

[ILuvRamen]

And old people have powered wheel chairs so it's even. Not that I'm implying a 35 year old programmer would need one lol. In fact, they'll have robolegs or their brain in a robot body when they're old :P

Re:Some, not all...

[Jesus_666]

Depends. Quicksort is manageable, but once you get to stuff like clever-quicksort vs. radix-exchange sort vs. quick-weak-heapsort vs. relaxed-weak-heapsort and the theory behind them things get more interesting. It's not like quicksort is adequate for everything. Or like every sorting algorithm is trivial.

Which sorting algorithms does one need to be able to implement? With or without reference? I'm not saying that people shouldn't at least have known the theory behind some algorithms at one point but "you should know sorting algorithms if you want to be a programmer" is very vague.