Early Experiences in Software Economics

This created some good habits for me, such as defensive programming, careful desk checking, test planning, and analyzing before coding. But it also created some bad habits--a preoccupation with saving microseconds, patching object code, etc--which were hard to unlearn when the balance of hardware and software costs began to tip the other way. For example, when Fortran came to General Dynamics in 1957, there was a forward-looking bunch of programmers who came to work wearing Fortran T-shirts and bragged about how much faster they could develop programs. But I was still one of the recalcitrant assembly-language programmers, bragging about how we wasted less of those precious computer cycles.