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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?"

2 of 731 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Yes, I'm old by isBandGeek() · · Score: 0, Redundant

    It's what real programmers do to make 64 gig of RAM enough for anyone.

    I would really love 64gig of RAM in my PC. Surely you mean 64MB?

  2. Re:Yes, I'm old by twostix · · Score: 0, Redundant

    "Hey, we had a crash 42 hours into the run, can you take a look?"
    "Sure, it'll take me about 120 hours to get to it with a debug build."

    Perhaps you should take a course on exception handling and logging.

    And before you ask, I work on a system that takes weeks to analyse data and create reports too.