What old-school programming/system building techniques would you like to see used more?

Question

As an industry we tend to have a short attention span and be easily distracted by "new" things—which often turn out to be old things, effortfully re-invented.

Tony Hoare said that if we could learn the right lessons from the successes of the past we wouldn't have to learn from the failures.

What were those successes, in terms of techniques and approaches?

What effective (thinking)tools and programming techniques did you learn back in the day that you wish were used more often on the systems of today?

Answer 1

Loop invariants, loop variants (a non-negative value that's guaranteed to decrease at every leg through the loop thus guaranteeing it will end), weakest preconditions, class invariants, and the like, are what I mostly miss from the old days.

Pre- and post-conditions of functions/methods, thanks maybe to the cool rebranding as "contracts", are still reasonably popular, but I see hardly any reference these days to these kinds of assertions which have more to do with the internal working of one component, than with the interface between components (I'll admit the latter is intrinsically a harder and more pressing issue, but ensuring each component is working soundly is hardly wasted effort;-).

Answer 2

I miss programming languages that compile to machine code.

Everything these days seems to run in virtual machines or be interpreted. I bought a computer to run programs, not to have to load a virtual computer to run programs.

I know the benefits, I am just fed-up and grumpy.

Before anyone (smart arses :P) points out that the CPU microcode can be thought of as a virtual machine ... it doesn't stall for garbage collection or cost me 20% performance :)

Answer 3

What about using more basic network technologies, instead of adding piles of protocols embedded in other protocols like SOAP over HTTP on SSL on TCP/IP tunneled on HTTP over SSL ?

Answer 4

Stop and plan things out before you write any code.

Answer 5

Languages that 'compile' to C code so that they're automatically portable but also end up generating efficient machine code.