4 ms·

It is nice to see it when we get first implementation where "business" invents some rules, like only 2 items for this list or something like that. Next month w

• mattmanser 7y ago
  No, as others have mentioned the reason for this was to save bytes or bandwidth when bytes and bandwidth were really expensive.
  • rdiddly 7y ago
    That's what others here have conjectured. Suddenly it's authoritative?
    • dredmorbius 7y ago
      Look up two-digit date fields, packed-decimal, zoned-decimal, bitfields, and other encoded-field datatypes. All were explicitly created to save on data storage, when the main transmission medium was punch cards. The rationalisation is not conjecture. It's fact. Bits and baud were expensive. And that's before getting to bitshifted storage of software and similar tricks. SABRE dates from the 1950s. Which was a long time ago in Internet Years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_(computer_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_(computer_system) The computer it was based, the IBM 7090, on had memory storage of 32,768 words of 36 bits, about 64 KB using today's 16-bit byte. It operated at 100 kflops/s. A modern AMD-64 CPU tends around 4-64 flops per cycle, or in the neighbourhood of 4-250 gigaflops/s, up to about 2 billion times faster. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_7090 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_7090 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS
      • rdiddly 7y ago
        I've programmed on punched cards. System/360, FORTRAN77. Carter administration. Whether history exists or not, is not the question. Whether byte misers from long ago caused this name-mangling issue, that's the conjecture part. At least one aspect of the guy's complaint was of recent origin, and ironically that was from arbitrarily insisting the name be longer than it is.
        • dredmorbius 7y ago
          The SE answer links to the relevant documentation. Spaces are indeed optional. It's not explicitly documented that a non-whitespaced 'MR' is read as a title, but it seems likely. http://www.amadeus.com/bg/documents/aco/bg/basic-qrg.pdf http://www.amadeus.com/bg/documents/aco/bg/basic-qrg.pdf
          • deleted 7y ago
            [deleted]
          • rdiddly 7y ago
            Well I'm convinced then. That's nuts. Not so much that something so crappy can exist, but that it can persist!
    • coldtea 7y ago
      Yes, because some of the "others" were actually there, then...
• FpUser 7y ago
  "So with agile we are better now because we can remove stupid rules in next iteration and not leave it hanging there for decades." Nice try. Fixing bugs and changing bad logic in timely manner were done ages ago when nobody knew that Agile term.
  • chris_wot 7y ago
    Yes, but in many cases the rules were not fixed also. Agile is a mindset and philosophy. Whilst not a panacea, i feel it does help reduce inertia in organisations that adopt it.
    • FpUser 7y ago
      Yes, but in many cases the rules were not fixed also What does this have to do with Agile? You either have adequate resources (human and money) and desire to fix problems or not. Absent that issues and bugs are lingering for years in organizations that employ agile. I saw it with my own eyes.
• jschwartzi 7y ago
  Agile doesn't help you here. It might only take a day to fix this issue in your code base. But then it will take months to get it tested and approved. And then it has to be rolled out into the organization and periodically analyzed during the rollout until it's done. Given how large airlines are and how many people interface with an airline booking system Agile's "contribution" to development timing is meaningless here. You could spend a day making a fix and a couple years watching that fix slowly percolate into the organization, followed by another couple of years waiting for all the travel agents to stop calling and complaining about how this impacts the workflow they've had for the last 20 years.