Re: [comphist] Lost arts from the 8 bit days.

[Rob L. <la...@tr...>]

On Wednesday 02 October 2002 04:26 pm, Eric S. Raymond wrote:

> > But the art of small code, using neat trick, like the unused bits
> > of one variable for bools and condition registers is not done now.
> > Imagine most x86 programmers trying to write code with just the
> > 6502 register set (A, X and Y).
>
> I am *glad* this kind of programming is dying out.  And I say that as
> somebody who did a lot of it back when it was necessary.  I'll say
> this once:
>
> 	MAINTAINABILITY IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN EFFICIENCY

I agree.  But it's important to learn both.

> No, that wasn't the case fifteen years ago, or even ten.  Machines were
> too constrained.

And hence the Y2K problem. :)

>  But today, if I were managing a project and caught
> anybody doing tricks like you describe, I'd chew him out but good.  There
> is such a thing as being too clever in the wrong direction, and this is it.

One advantage of the 8 bits is there wasn't enough space to get truly lost.  
No mater how intricate, non-obvious, or obfuscated, it was still 64k of ram, 
and you could read through the whole thing from start to finish, in hex, in a 
couple hours.  Maintainability pretty much took care of itself.

Now with 128 megs of ram and zillions of gigabytes of hard disk, it's trivial 
to make something so incredibly big and nasty that even the author can't 
understand it after a while.  Plus with that much system resources, the 
output of multiple programmers can be absorbed by a single machine, so you 
have interfacing between programmers as a big source of complexity...

Managing the scale of your program is still the main problem, it's just the 
limiting factor switched from the capabilities of the box to the capabilities 
of the programmers.  In a certain way, it's the same TYPE of problem, 
anyway...

Rob