Why is the main() of Java void ?

[Owen Jacobson]

Lew wrote On 11/05/07 17:24,:

[...]
Furthermore, "define completely up front" (a.k.a., "Waterfall") has been
proven a) not to work, and b) never to happen in real life.

Well, I *did* say the advice was hard to follow!
Still, "proven not to work" and "proven never to happen"
sound like overstatements. The counter-example, again, is
Knuth: How many "agile" developers hand out exponentially-
growing monetary rewards to people who find bugs in their
programs? Knuth does: he is offering $327.68 for the next
bug in either TeX or METAFONT. I think he started at $2.56
(one million in binary); if so, there have been only seven
bugs found in the two programs since their initial releases
more than twenty years ago. Would that the JRE were one-
tenth as solid!

We ordinary mortals may be unable to reach Knuth's high
standards, but his results speak for themselves -- and if
an ordinary mortal sniffs at the "proven not to work" methods
that produce results so much better than his own, he does so
at some risk of ridicule.

If you are as talented and meticulous as Donald Knuth is, you don't
need an externally-imposed process to produce solid software. All of
these external processes are intended to be checks and balances on
more average programmers, like most of us.