Re: Estimating Software Projects
Yes, back then you wrote reams of code (Assembler or COBOL anyone?) and you really felt like you had achieved something.
I still get some of that with modern languages, but these days a lot of it is just threading together a bunch of library calls. A lot of it is rinse and repeat using templated code, which just isn't the same.
My first day at college was great. We had to write a simple program to calculate the minimum number of coins a person would receive in change. A task that took all of 10 minutes. What to do with the remaining hour of the class? We were using PETs and I had used them at school, so I just bashed in some machine code to draw a border around the screen, split it in 2, display the input amount in 8x8 graphics at the top of the screen and draw little piles at the bottom to represent the change.
The lecturer looked at my screen and said "wow, I didn't know you could do that with a computer!" Oh, boy, and I was the one there to learn something!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
