From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: scj@yaccman.com (scj@yaccman.com) Date: Sun, 4 Sep 2016 10:03:15 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] Comments on "C" In-Reply-To: References: <20160901091746.1F3734422E@lignose.oclsc.org> Message-ID: 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." >