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236 Are the Androids Dreaming Yet?
commercial software, equating to about 10 words per day. A good typist
types at 80 words per minute and most programmers are reasonable
typists. So software writers in a big project spend only a minute or so
per day in the act of writing. The rest is taken up by meetings, process
discussions, email, reporting and so on. In projects that avoid much
of this administrative overhead, good software programmers reach a
long-run average of about 225 lines per day. This has been the level of
productivity on the products I have developed in the past. These projects
were lucky. They had a single team on the task from beginning to end and,
in general, the projects took few wrong turns. Still these programmers
were spending only 10-20 minutes of each day on actual programming.
What were they doing the rest of the time?
In the early days of programming you might have a great idea,
but the process of turning this idea into software was immensely long-
winded. I learned to program at Manchester University in the 1980s. The
enormous machines in the basement of the computer building provided
heat for both our building and the mathematics tower next door. We were
not permitted to play with these basement monsters but were ‘privileged’
to submit instructions to a mini computer in the undergraduate section
- a PDP11-34.
For those of you not acquainted with computers I can tell you the
process of writing software in the 1980s was immensely tedious. To
add two numbers and display them on a screen took a month of lab
time, using detailed instructions written in machine code. Everything
was manual, including writing your code out in pencil on special paper
with little numbered squares and then giving it to someone to type in
overnight! You would return the next day to discover whether you had a
usable program or a something riddled with errors. If you found an error,
it would require editing. This was nothing like using a modern word
processor. The online editors of the day were the ultimate in annoying
software. If you misspelled a word, you would need to count up the letters
and spaces manually on a printout and enter a command - replace letter
27 of line 40 with the character ‘r. Each and every typo would take five
minutes to correct. I managed to finish the simple program required for
course credit — I think it displayed an eight-digit decimal number — and
ran for the hills. In my second year I bought a PC and decamped to
the physics department next door where I remained for the rest of my
undergraduate life.
The PC revolution provided programmers with a new and intuitive
software creation environment where almost all the tedium was removed.
A wealth of tools for creating software was pioneered by Bill Gates of
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