4 Sep
2016
4 Sep
'16
11:03 p.m.
Before I headed off to my first summer job, my mother, who was working as
a programmer, gave me some good advice: "before you throw away a deck of
cards, put a rubber band around it...". Saved my butt twice that
summer...
Incidentally, I figured the other day that a Petabyte of data, if punched
onto punched cards, would make a deck that was 6 times higher than the
distance to the moon...
Steve
On Thu, 1 Sep 2016, Norman Wilson wrote:
Programming well requires a lot of thought and
care and careful
rereading, and often throwing half the code out and re-doing it better,
and until we can have a programming community the majority of whom are
up to those challenges, we will continue to have crashes and security
vulnerabilities and other embarrassing bugs aplenty, no matter what
language is used.
I think I saw that in CACM: "Prepare to throw out half your code, because
you will anyway".
Then there was the time I saw a Uni student, when, ambling down the
corridor at UNSW Comp Sci, he tripped and spilled the entire deck of
cards; after laughing for a while, I helped him to put them through the
reader-sorter (fortunately, they were sequenced, I think).
When I think back on some of the code I wrote, I still shudder... Mind
you, this was back in the days of the IBM-360 and the PDP-11, and I'd only
just graduated, m'lud.
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will
suffer."