At 16:12 05-04-20, you wrote:
On 4/5/20 6:28 PM, geneb via cctalk wrote:
On Sun, 5 Apr 2020, Neil Thompson via cctalk wrote:
I'm convinced that Dijksta (and anyone else who came out with similar
comments were full of horseshit. In my opinion, it's the ability to
translate a real world "thing" into an algorithm that is the essense of
programming, and anyone who has managed to learn (particularly on their
own, as many of us did) that ability has learned something that transcends
the language (or tool) you use to implement the algorithm. When I first
started programming professionally, we had "programmers" (or sometimes
designers) who specified the algorithms and "coders" who implemented them.
That never worked well
Yep. You can write horrible code in /any/ language. ;)
BTW, I scanned & uploaded this last week. Oddly relevant.
https://archive.org/details/cobolcodingform
I still have lots of them. And Printer Output Forms. And Fortran
Programming Forms. And all kinds of other Programming forms. And
Flow Chart Forms. You know all that stuff we actually used to
engineer programs before the software engineers came along and said
we were all doing wrong.
bill
Ran into a bunch of my FORTRAN programs from over
50 years ago as well as the obligatory flowcharts
I would do first before writing a single line of
code. Code written in pencil so could erase
errors and only then would I use a keypunch for
final version. Also a few FORTRAN coding
forms. Back then, with sometimes a 48 hour delay
between submitting my card deck and getting
program output, it was well worth spending an
hour or two to print out contents of cards and
carefully check that there weren't missing commas
and or other errors that would mean correcting
the stupid mistake and resubmitting ones card deck.
Never got into COBOL as my main interest was
real-time computing and so next step up was
access to PDP-8 which had FOCAL and quickly
learned that programming in assembler was the way
to go. Still like assembly language programming
and suspect my early experience of learning to
code in an environment where there wasn't really
a dividing line between software and hardware
(people would build custom boards for
PDP-8's/PDP-11's to speed up data acquisition)
that the biggest change I made in my programming
style was to switch to VB as it allowed me to
easily create the graphical interface I needed
but still let me link to C or Assembler routines
in my VB6 code until windoze became too locked
down to be of any use. Still haven't got all my
VB6 programs running under Wine on Linux but at least Linux has FORTRAN and C.
Part of what I've noticed is that I can't sit
down at a keyboard and write code (as one is
supposed to do nowadays) and it turns into a
total mess. I still use flowcharts when I'm
dealing with tricky code and the nice thing about
flowcharts is that one can easily create a
hardware state machine from them. Was nice in
1970's, but now a Propeller chip, even using
interperted Spin code, works far faster than the
TTL state machines I used to make. Other
paleo-programmer related deficits include being
totally unable to use RDB and still make use of
linked lists and hash tables to create my
databases as have been doing this for 50
years. Software Tools was probably the most
important book I read in 1983 as it got me out of
my rut of writing a massive FORTRAN program to do
a specific task that I'd have no idea how to
modify even 6 months later to small useful tools
that could be strung together. Back then
engineers I worked with would have total disdain
for Comp-Sci types who would still be working out
their code indentation scheme while we would
already be using a quickly written throwaway
program to perform a particular task.
The other thing I should bring up is that my wife
is after me to get rid of a lot of my old
books. While rumaging through the attic of my
shop found boxes of old computer books which I'd
like to keep but have been told that if I haven't
looked at them in 15 years that it's unlikely I
will in future. Will check in see if some of
them have been scanned onto bitsavers or other
sites but have 68000 programming books, 6502 and
other microprocessor related books as well as
lots of Mac books when I just had to get into the
guts of a Mac to do what I wanted. Have a number
of PDP-11 Unibus cards which likely won't use and
will have to get all of that sorted out. Once
have a list of what I've got will post it on my
web site. I live in Kamloops, BC if there's
anyone on this list who lives close by who's interested.
