[FRIAM] IT is Not Sustainable

[Marcus Daniels]

Frank writes:

“This was the telephone network in question.“

With the mobile carriers and VOIP, I wonder how much of that code is still used?  I once worked for a small company that wrote software to do billing for long distance telephone carriers.  I was amazed by the seemingly arbitrary complexity.   Complex at a policy and inter-organizational level, not just the software.

Marcus

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com>
Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Date: Thursday, December 26, 2019 at 5:39 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] IT is Not Sustainable

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<mailto:gary at naturesvisualarts.com>> wrote:
Spot on.

On Thu, Dec 26, 2019 at 2:29 AM Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com<mailto: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<mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of lists at hpcoders.com.au<mailto: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<mailto:hpcoder at hpcoders.com.au>
    Economics, Kingston University         http://www.hpcoders.com.au
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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