We where doing MR back in the early 80's on the largest cluster of super mini's in the UK - dam right Cliff was a genius the project would have not worked with out him.
My point? What, are you feeling insulted? If so, stop. After all, I don't know him or you or anything about the project you were on. Anybody reading my comment would know that.
I thought maybe you missed the point of the article, that's all. Read it again, more closely. Perhaps then you'll see Cliff in a different light.
If you missed the point of the article and he wrote a 1400 line 'if' statement, then it's at least plausible that you're both stuck behind that first or second wall. I could easily be wrong. Then again, maybe this article has the key you need to catapult yourself far ahead of Cliff. He may well be a genius, but you could potentially be far more effective and productive. You may even be able to accomplish things that Cliff would fail at.
Fortran77 though. pretty limited set of organizational tools to work with there. Procs and Modules is it, I think (though I'm no expert). Many of the patterns we're used to using for code organization just wouldn't be available.
So how you would deal with a really big if statement without having more sophisticated tools? The business logic must have had a very large number of conditional branches. Even if you encapsulate the instructions of each branch in their own proc, it still doesn't change the fact that you're going to have a large number of conditions.
This isn't particularly a solved problem even in modern languages. We can use all kinds of layers of abstraction to make individual units of code smaller, but it's sort of an illusion. Splatting your business logic across a dozen or more files/modules/classes whatever might make it easier to look at in a text editor but it doesn't make it easier to develop or test. If you've got complex business logic you're going to have a complex program.
the system was broken down into a lot of sub processes from memory the 1400 long branch if was just a branching if then else statement - most weren't as bad.
A core part of the documentation was large number of A1 sheets which covered an entre wall of our office ;-)
The core of the system working out what do to with all the log records was a collection of Pl/1G.
We did have to build a lot of extra stuff you get for free nowadays we had a custom build system that you could use to build any part or the whole system written in primes JCL.
We where doing MR back in the early 80's on the largest cluster of super mini's in the UK - dam right Cliff was a genius the project would have not worked with out him.