by calebjosue on 8/6/24, 5:26 PM with 4 comments
Still, sometimes I found asking myself what kind of test methodology people like Dennis Ritchie exercised? You know, inventing a programming language like C seems a colossal endeavor.
In general what kind of testing methodology they were using back in the day, in the "golden age" of computing.
Sorry if the answer for this question is heavily documented elsewhere and I didn't do a proper research prior to asking.
Thanks!
by gregjor on 8/7/24, 12:33 AM
We didn't have debuggers per se, but we could step through code one instruction at a time and examine memory. On the PDP minicomputers you would do that from the front panel with switches and lights.
I had to read assembly code and dis-assemble memory contents into assembly routinely back then. I'm sure Dennis Ritchie did that too, that skill was part of the toolbox.
While TDD became a buzzword and cult much later, in the companies I worked at back then we often/usually had to submit a test plan with code to run the tests for any non-trivial code. At my first job (Nike, 1979) we called that code a test harness, more or less the same thing as modern unit tests without the automation. Most companies I worked for through the '80s would run a parallel hardware system for testing/staging, and we worked with business and systems analysts who could verify correct implementation of business rules and look for performance bottlenecks (more of an issue back then compared to today).
Brian Kernighan wrote a book about his days at Bell Labs that covers the development of Unix and C.
by 082349872349872 on 8/6/24, 7:27 PM
(Doug and Ken were still posting there as of last month, and if anyone knows what Dennis' testing habits were back then, they would)