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Date:	Sun, 15 Jan 2006 16:24:26 PST8
From:	"Lynn H. Maxson" <lmaxson@pacbell.net >
Reply-To:	scoug-programming@scoug.com
To:	< "scoug-programming@scoug.com" > scoug-programming@scoug.com >
Subject:	SCOUG-Programming: Pushing ahead

Content Type: text/plain

Greg,

You have no idea of just how much I appreciate your
contributions to this forum and to our Programming SIG. I
have to let it reverberate somewhat to see if I prefer "great
pumpkin" or "great bumpkin". I checked and you did spell my
name right.:-)

I appreciate your polling of the membership to come up with
the voting results. It may upset Steven's agenda for February,
but we may as well go with jEdit instead of VIM with or
without porting it with the Watcom IDE.

By the way I did mean a hundred thousand pages, which at 66
lines per page, assuming on average one statement per line,
comes to 6.6 million statements. On my original 8Mhz PC (if my
remembering is correct) it think it was Borland with its Turbo
Pascal who bragged about processing some 30,000 statements
a second. At that rate it would take 220 seconds or 3 minutes
and 40 seconds. On my somewhat old and slow 200Mhz
Pentium Pro machine I would guess that it would take under a
minute.

Assuming that number of statements, 6.6 million might apply to
an operating system like OS/2 or Linux or (God-forbid)
Windows. compiling an entire operating system as a single unit
of work with complete synchronization of all source, having
an executable form ready for regression testing in under 3
minutes would set a new world record. Then again what the
hell do I know about productivity?

I regret to inform you and Mr. Wilson that you cannot develop
software absent a development process, regardless of how
you choose to do it. That's why they call it development.

Four of the stages--specification, analysis, design, and
construction--offer a "natural" sequence or order. You can
do them out of order. I've certainly experience my share of
"program now, think later" programmers. Each in third
generation and earlier programming languages involve a
different written form, thus different source. Fourth
generation, which doesn't include JAVA, involves only one
written form, thus one source. Moreover the logical units of
that source can appear in any order, i.e. unordered or random,
on input, another advantage over third generation
(procedural) languages.

FYI, I did a google search on American Scientist, located your
author, his article, and read it. As I advocate a development
process similar to what he does in terms of taking advantage
of available technology I don't see where we differ. He has
just not had the advantage of reading my work.

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