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0 pointsbdavis__5y ago0 comments

In the early 1990's a hardware vendor demo'ed an ada compiler at a customer site. Fortran compile of a subroutine was about 30 seconds, link of an executable was about 5 minutes.

We booted the ada disk first thing in the morning, changed some writeln() statements, and kicked off the build.

After lunch, the executable was ready (this was not "hello world", but a system with maybe 50K SLOC.

Not practical on that date, with machines that existed. As for writing code that worked, and eliminating defects by language design, ada has no peer. Even in 2021.

Today compile time is not a problem.

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throwawayboise5y ago

At around that time, I would see multi-hour delays on compiles of COBOL code on a busy mainframe. Not because the compiles really took a long time, but because the development region could not keep up with the submission rate of compile jobs from developers.

That aside, work got done. You spent a little more time checking your code for errors instead of letting the compiler do it.

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