Chapter 26. The Benefits of Visibility

I remember writing my first program, a FORTRAN exercise for a course known as 6.41. Everything went by the numbers at M.I.T. in those days, and so did my program. It was a breeze to write, it just didn't compile the first time. Or the second. I was devastated and dumbfounded. When I finally did get it to compile, I was utterly shocked to find out it didn't work. I couldn't see why; it looked right to me. I showed it to my roommate. Marshall was a math major. I think he was writing algorithms before there were computers to run them on.

“I can't figure out what's wrong with this program, see, it's supposed to…” He grabbed the print-out, what we affectionately called an 80-80 listing, for reasons that only those ...

Get Peopleware Papers: Notes on the Human Side of Software, The now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.