The story of Mel (1983)

Re:The story of Mel (1983) by Tichy on Monday June 29, 2009 @12:56PM (#679245)

I think you missed the part where it was 1983 (edit: actually even earlier, only the article is from 83).

I remember from "No Silver Bullet" (or was it "Mythical Man Month") how at one time it was a revolutionary idea to store documentation/comments along with the source code. It sounds crazy to ever have done it differently, but in earlier times, disk space was probably too scarce to do that. Likewise I suppose Mel's style was appropriate for the machines of his time.

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Re:The story of Mel (1983) by ubernostrum on Monday June 29, 2009 @02:13PM (#679374)

I think both you and Mel missed Brian Kernighan's old adage:

"Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?"

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Re:The story of Mel (1983) by michael_dorfman on Monday June 29, 2009 @02:49PM (#679460)

But that only holds if Mel was working at the limit of his cleverness. I'm willing to assume, based on the evidence, that he still had some excess cleverness capacity reserved for debugging.

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Re:The story of Mel (1983) by aardvark on Monday June 29, 2009 @04:11PM (#679582)

Mel likely wrote the blackjack program before Kernighan ever offered that advice.

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