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Conference turris::languages

Title:Languages
Notice:Speaking In Tongues
Moderator:TLE::TOKLAS::FELDMAN
Created:Sat Jan 25 1986
Last Modified:Wed May 21 1997
Last Successful Update:Fri Jun 06 1997
Number of topics:394
Total number of notes:2683

40.0. "DEC's BLISS investment" by BEING::PETTENGILL () Sat Oct 20 1984 01:41

Can anyone comment on the size of DEC's investment in BLISS ?

I suppose measures might be man years of code written

or time to replace all the code currently in BLISS with new code written
in a new language like ADA

or the number of engineers that currently write in BLISS that would need
"retraining" or the number of man years this retraining would cost

or the number of excellent engineers that DEC can't hire because they can't
stand the thought of writing in BLISS

or the cost to train engineers to learn BLISS

or the cost of continuing arguments about how bad the choice was for BLISS
or how terrible and difficult BLISS is to learn

or some other "enlightening" measure.

My SWAG is that DEC products (primarily VMS based) represent about
1000 man years of development in BLISS; am I high, low, or about right ?
(don't ask me how I came up with that number, its strictly SWAG...)
T.RTitleUserPersonal
Name		DateLines
40.1LATOUR::AMARTINSun Oct 21 1984 15:1211
There are 3540774 characters written in Bliss-10 for the Fortran-10/20
compiler.  They constitute 123364 lines, or 2558 line printer pages.

I'd have to ask Sara Murphy, the Fortran supervisor, how many
man-years of effort that represents.  She is one of the original
authors, and may be able to come up with a figure.

I'll also ask her how many "excellent engineers" have turned down job
offers to work on the project because one of the implementation
languages used is Bliss.
				/AHM
40.2BARTOK::BARABASHMon Oct 22 1984 15:2923
  I have a report by Vijay Trehan of the SAC Technical Office dated
  January 7, 1983 titled "Lines-Of-Code Data for VAX Software".  This
  report shows how much VAX software was written in BLISS as of
  December, 1982.  The lines-of-code data below excludes those lines
  of a program that are either blank or contain only comment statements.

  VMS V3.0 data was available for 93 components with 452897 lines of BLISS,
  343653 lines of MACRO, and 70225 lines of code written in other
  languages (predominantly FORTRAN).  Lines-of-code data was not available
  for the following components: DCL, SDL/MDL, MESSAGE, and HELP.

  Some 30 layered product groups from the LP list submitted lines-of-code
  data to the study.  These 30 layered products contained 1090806 lines
  of BLISS, 242932 lines of MACRO, and 156966 lines of code written in
  other languages (predominantly FORTRAN and BASIC).  There were 31 other LPs
  that did not supply lines-of-code data.

  - - -
  Nobody knows how many good software engineers turned down careers
  at DEC because of the use of BLISS, but I would estimate the number
  to be zero.

-- Bill B.
40.3LATOUR::AMARTINTue Oct 23 1984 11:1814
Re .0:

Nope, Sara never heard of someone who wouldn't work on something written
in Bliss because it was written in Bliss.  Not any "excellent engineers",
anyway.  The question of whether using Bliss makes things harder for people
in the field who want to read the code is open.  However, I don't think
that there are many people who can understand the insides of a large
software product like an optimizing compiler, yet can't learn one more
algorithmic language.

Re .2:

An impressive set of numbers.  It is also impressive that they were collected.
				/AHM