But, per my other comment, being able to fix things and rerun quickly isn't necessarily "trial and error programming". Even when it was, we LEARNED from those errors, didn't repeat them, and progressed to writing solid code. Getting to that point far faster than with the ancient turnaround times.

Hey I’m just relating the observations of a cranky geezer. One certainly couldn’t operate under that kind of structure in this day and age. Those guys had like 16kbits for the whole operating system.

Totally agree. And no disrespect to my predecessors - they were giants.