Retrotechtacular: critical code reading, 70s style

Anyone who has ever made a living writing code has probably had some version of the following in mind: "Always write your code so the next person can understand it." Each coder then did the exact opposite, using cryptic variables and bizarre structures that no one else could track. And every coder also forgot the next part of that saying - "Because the next person might be you" - and continued to curse an often anonymous predecessor when an equally inscrutable code is forced upon them to maintain. To hell with cognitive dissonance!

It's a story as old as time, or at least as old as programming exists as a profession. And in 1975, poorly written code was enough of a problem for a company called Edutronics to create the animated gem Critical Program Reading: Structuring an Unstructured Program. This is apparently the first part of a larger series on structured programming techniques, and comes to us from [Alec Watson], host of Technology Connections on YouTube, through his second string, the delightfully named Connextras Technology.

The film's three low-animated characters, each of whom could have been the villain in an episode of Scooby Doo, are loaded by a stern narrator analyzing a fragment of pseudocode written in a concoction of COBOL, PL/1 and a host of other languages. The code is a hot mess, but our heroes go through it awful line by line, making it more readable by guessing more descriptive variable names, adding structured elements, and making logical changes to improve program flow. The example code is very contrived, of course, but the business logic becomes much clearer as our team refactors the code and makes it much more accessible.

For as much as languages ​​have changed since the 1970s, and with all the advancements we've made in software engineering, the lessons presented in this film are still surprisingly relevant. We loved a lot of the little nuggets dropped along the way, like "Consistency Helps Understanding" and "Use Symbols Naturally". But we'll make an exception with the statement "Wrong means bad structure" - we wrote saw a lot of correctly structured code that didn't really work. We also liked the attempt at social engineering a less toxic work environment: "Be tactful in personal criticism". If only they could learn that lesson on Stack Overflow.

It's unclear where [Alec] got this 16mm film - we sure would love to hear that story - but it's a beauty and we're glad he took the time to digitize it. We're always amazed at its ability to make even the most mundane aspects of technology fascinating, and while this movie might be a little off its normal fare, it's still a great find.