I'll confess: I was never very good at
bench checking batch programs, but only had at most a handful of
assignments in college: generally cycles were cheap on
time-sharing systems and I quickly adapted to interactive
debugging.
Over time (with embedded systems in
networking gear and other applications), that wasn't possible and
the new skill I admired was being able to add effective logging to
diagnose problems. And since most of those systems were some
combination of real-time/multiprocessor/multithreaded, it was
generally not possible to deterministically repeat the sequence.
On 8/9/22 11:15 AM, Andrew Hume wrote:
rob, clem:
has
there been a shift in ability? or is this more likely a sampling
bias
(because there were so many fewer programmers then)?
I
still marvel at the productivity and precision
of his generation of programmers.
Amen.