[FRIAM] IT is Not Sustainable

[Frank Wimberly]

At Bell Labs we sure didn't pay anyone by LOC.  We also had code reviews
and software tools to enforce standards and very high pay.  With a brand
new PhD I made more than all but the 3 most senior members of the CS
faculty at Pitt where I was a grad student.  This was the telephone network
in question.

Despite the high pay I disliked software administration methodology.  The
disagreements between the software tool developers (version control,
integration of subsystems, compilers, etc) and the implementors of the
applications, such as call processing, were epic.  Recall that Bell Labs
invented C and Unix.  After 18 months I returned to Pittsburgh to work at
Carnegie Mellon in Robotics for two thirds the salary.

Number 5 ESS was first deployed in March 1982, 4 years after work began.  I
suspect that it didn't have 200 million lines of code then, but close to
it.  Maybe Dave doesn't consider it an IT project but many of the software
tools that were developed were included in later Unix releases, I believe.

It's going to be a beautiful day in Santa Fe.

Frank


-----------------------------------
Frank Wimberly

My memoir:
https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

My scientific publications:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone (505) 670-9918

On Thu, Dec 26, 2019, 1:28 AM Gary Schiltz <gary at naturesvisualarts.com>
wrote:

> Spot on.
>
> On Thu, Dec 26, 2019 at 2:29 AM Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Most programmers won't struggle to rationalize or improve code written by
>> other people.    The problem is that people are selfish.  They think that
>> their 10K LOC problem is beautiful and nimble, but that 1M LOC was once
>> that too.    It's the behavior of teenagers.
>>
>> On 12/25/19, 10:47 PM, "Friam on behalf of Russell Standish" <
>> friam-bounces at redfish.com on behalf of lists at hpcoders.com.au> wrote:
>>
>>     It's all about the LOC! Actually, I kind of agree - having worked on
>>     some MegaLOC codebases that functionally seemed to be no more complex
>>     than a 10KLOC project I'm involved in, the 10KLOC project is much more
>>     nimble - compile times are far less, making changes to the code easier
>>     and bugs less troublesome to winkle out.
>>
>>     I've also refactored or rewritten pieces of code to slash the LOC by a
>>     factor of 3 or more for that particular section (eg 3KLOC -> 1KLOC) -
>>     but usually when bugs and problems kept on cropping up in that
>>     section.
>>
>>     Even though the LOC is an entirely bogus measurement - if you paid a
>>     programmer by LOC, you'd get boilerplate and crappy comments.
>>
>>     --
>>
>>
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>     Dr Russell Standish                    Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
>>     Principal, High Performance Coders
>>     Visiting Senior Research Fellow        hpcoder at hpcoders.com.au
>>     Economics, Kingston University         http://www.hpcoders.com.au
>>
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
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