Author: Bob Durrett
Date: 14:15:43 11/10/00
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On November 10, 2000 at 15:06:20, Georg v. Zimmermann wrote: <snip> >This idea you mention is especially hard to program. <snip> Yes, I'll bet that it is! But, before my retirement a few years ago, I worked with organizations who developed extremely large software "packages," many orders of magnitude more complex than a chess engine. What I vaguely recall from those old days is that no one man or woman tried to do it all by himself or herself. It took a team effort and it took time and plenty of mistakes along the way. I also recall that solutions to the many programming problems to be solved were rarely known from the beginning. But, as they got into it, the solutions were found and often by some very innovative people. Often problems did not become apparent until the software had been in service for some time. Customer problems surfaced and were fixed. In one sense, the development of complex software is akin to development of complex hardware systems, or systems incorporating both hardware and software closely integrated. The new Space Station serves as a recent example. Development goes from "a gleam in the father's eye" to a finished product by a process which is performed in stages. Overall concepts must come first. If the concept being discussed here seems "half-baked," then that is because it is not much further along in the process than that "gleam in the father's eye." But don't knock gleams in father's eyes!!!!! If not for them, none of us would be here. Of course it would be hard to program. No-one ever said that life would be easy! Recall the song "I never promised you a rose garden." [or something like that]
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