on Sat, 9 Aug 2003
14:20:40 PDT7
> I propose more documentation, the bane of many projects. I propose more
> comments in the code, the bane of many programmers. I propose voice
> documentation appended to the code in appropriate places. And yes, I
> propose creating a robust subset of English which can be used for
> "writing" programs.
The last project I worked on for Big Blue the code did not have any comments.
The code segments were documented with tables of inputs and outputs, tables of
internal states, and a meta language, one of which was Z the other I can not
remember but was History something. The code segment followed the tables. So
nowhere in the document was there ever more than a few lines of code to a max
of a dozen or so, sometimes only one line of code would appear. The developers
never compiled to code, for one thing trying to copy a entire program from the
document was just too much effort. The testers had a program that they used on
the document to extract the code for the entire project and compile it (this
was the first time the code gets compiled). The output of that compile went
into test. The code very seldom failed to compile and the tests had very few
errors to report. The project schedule was on one month cycles and each cycle
had a complete system that would function at some level which increased over
time. When you got around to writing the code (the last step in the
documentation process) you could have hired a bunch of trained monkeys to do
the work it was so simple as all of the preceding documentation had reduced any
and all complications down to the basics.
The process was called "Clean Room" and was used by NASA for programming the
space vehicles. Since you do not have too many chances to test the code before
an actual launch the code had better work the first time.
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