[shakna]

I worked on some ancient FORTRAN for CommBank (formerly Commonwealth Bank of Australia). Most of the details are still under NDAs, but the project was amazing.

Every variable and function was explained in a series of physical manuals in excruciating, and up-to-date, detail. The manuals had index lists by name, function, type and concept, making it ridiculously easy to find exactly what you were looking for. The documentation felt almost like reading Knuth's Art of Programming. It explained not just how a function worked, but also the dependencies and how they worked on that particular hardware, including pieces of the FORTRAN standard library.

On top of that nugget of most people's fantasies, there was actually a test suite! It wasn't written by the original authors, and had been pieced together over the years. But it was a testsuite for code running on a mainframe the size of a small room. Since when do you ever get tests for code written in the 70s!?

Working for CommBank was hard - the standards for absolutely everything that they have and do are A-grade. A single complaint from a coworker or customer can land you in front of a review board. But the work they produced, at least what I saw, is absolutely worth it.

[barking_biscuit]

>A single complaint from a coworker or customer can land you in front of a review board. But the work they produced, at least what I saw, is absolutely worth it.

Holy crap. Not sure whether I would love this or be destroyed by it haha.