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by jodrellblank 61 days ago
24 hour turnaround for compiles, expected to change a hundred lines and it fail to compile, and you get 4-6 attempts, so up to 6 days to get a thousand line program working? Now you can compile and check a thousand line program in milliseconds. It seems so unarguably more productive, why do you call it a 'pretence' of being more productive?
1 comments

> Now you can compile and check a thousand line program in milliseconds.

How do you define "productive?" Lines of code written per day? Bugs fixed per man hour? Fewest reported bugs per end user?

The fastest compiler in the world won't help you find all the runtime bugs that simply wouldn't have existed in the days of punch cards, when code was written with with more care and attentiveness since there wasn't a fast edit/compile/test development loop. YMMV, of course.