What to do?

Subject: What to do?
From: Michael D. Crawford (crawford@goingware.com)
Date: Fri Jan 05 2001 - 15:04:37 CST

Scotch?

While I must admit it can improve the quality of one's experience as a coder,
contemplate the experience others may have with the resulting code!

For my very first programming job, some guy hired a bunch of college students
for five bucks on hour to write a common lisp interpreter and compiler in C on
an IBM XT.

With the 640 KB limit of RAM in those days, it was not thought possible to
implement the whole common lisp standard on an XT. But John Bruno Hare had a
plan: he wrote a manually-operated virtual memory system with an 8 MB backing
store file. You'd create and work with data structures in the virtual memory
space by explicitly calling get() and put() to deal with 64-bit conses in the
file through a RAM cache. It had a LRU page system and everything.

Needless to say the resulting code was very complex.

One thing Bruno really liked to do, when he had some particularly nasty coding
to do, was wait until late at night to start work, then crack open one of those
extra-large cans of fine Japanese beer.

When I'd come in in the morning, Bruno would point to his PC and say, "this is
almost done, there's a few loose ends to wrap up. Could you finish it for me?"
And I'd sit down to find the code of a Madman.

I didn't last long at the job, but I learned a lot about software development
and Sapiens Software Star Sapphire Common Lisp actually eventually shipped -
after about three complete rewrites.

(Leonard, Sapiens Software was run out of Bruno's house kind of up the street
from the St. Francis Catholic Kitchen in Santa Cruz).

Mike 

-- 
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting
http://www.goingware.com/
crawford@goingware.com

   Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow.

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