Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/5/84; site umd5.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!bonnie!akgua!whuxlm!harpo!decvax!genrad!panda!talcott!harvard!seismo!umcp-cs!cvl!umd5!zben From: zben@umd5.UUCP Newsgroups: net.arch Subject: Re: Scientific Computing and mips Message-ID: <734@umd5.UUCP> Date: Fri, 6-Sep-85 21:45:57 EDT Article-I.D.: umd5.734 Posted: Fri Sep 6 21:45:57 1985 Date-Received: Mon, 9-Sep-85 02:28:28 EDT References: <419@kontron.UUCP> <2300001@uicsl> <1093@ames.UUCP> <1119@ames.UUCP> <1573@peora.UUCP> <72@l5.uucp> Reply-To: zben@umd5.UUCP (Ben Cranston) Organization: U of Md, CSC, College Park, Md Lines: 43 Summary: Program development philosophy In article <72@l5.uucp> laura@l5.UUCP (Laura Creighton) writes: >Can I write a prototype first? Ooops, now we have a political problem. >Management says yes and then ships the prototype. You never get to do a >rewrite and you have to support the prototype. Pretty soon you give up >prototyping... This is one of the advantages of working for a government agency and not for a private firm. A lot less pressure for results yesterday. I suspect this has a *LOT* to do with the finest software coming from research labs (BTL) and from universities (BSD?). >Which algorithms are best suited to this task? What is the best way to >think about programming in order to come up with the best programs? How >can I tell that algorithm A is going to be better than algorithm B without >building a prototype? You can't. Have you heard of the 'write one to throw away' philosophy? If you have the time to do it, this is the best way. Here a year and a half into my electronic mail program and I am rewriting the first routines that I originally wrote. And the new ones don't look a *thing* like the old ones... >And, once the program is written -- how to tell which parts need a >complete rewrite? That's easy. All of them. :-) >I think that these are all hard questions which everybody faces and mostly >solves by experience and personal opinion. I think that we are doing better >in discovering what makes a programmer more productive, but a lot of >these things (say UNIX and bitmapped workstations) are simply not available >to most programmers. Yeah, well, many of us seem to do fine on ADM3-clones talking to mainframes. I'm not sure sexy toys have anything to do with good programming. >Laura Creighton (note new address!) >sun!l5!laura (that is ell-five, not fifteen) >l5!laura@lll-crg.arpa Nice to hear from you again! Keep pluggin' away there! -- Ben Cranston ...{seismo!umcp-cs,ihnp4!rlgvax}!cvl!umd5!zben zben@umd2.ARPA