• RIP Niklaus Wirth

    From tenser@21:1/101 to All on Thursday, January 04, 2024 09:42:11
    RIP Niklaus Wirth, 1934-2024.

    Wirth was the inventor of the Algol/W, Pascal, Modula-2, and
    Oberon programming languages, the Oberon operating system,
    the Lilith workstation, and so much more. It is impossible
    to overstate his importance to modern computing.

    We have lost a giant.

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  • From Abbub@21:2/145 to Tenser on Wednesday, January 03, 2024 17:38:37
    *** Quoting Tenser to All dated 01-04-24 ***
    the Lilith workstation, and so much more. It is impossible
    to overstate his importance to modern computing.

    ...and his importance to BBSing, indirectly. A *large* portion of BBSing (at least on the PC) was built on Pascal (specifically Turbo Pascal) from the mid-eighties through the early 90s. I've probably had more fun hacking on Pascal code back in the day than any other software development I've done before or since. (And I say this as someone who has been doing software development for decades.)

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  • From poindexter FORTRAN@21:4/122 to tenser on Thursday, January 04, 2024 06:35:00
    tenser wrote to All <=-

    RIP Niklaus Wirth, 1934-2024.

    Wirth was the inventor of the Algol/W, Pascal, Modula-2, and
    Oberon programming languages, the Oberon operating system,
    the Lilith workstation, and so much more. It is impossible
    to overstate his importance to modern computing.


    Anyone who studied CS in the 90s on probably started off with Pascal -
    not sure about nowadays.


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  • From Avon@21:1/101 to tenser on Friday, January 05, 2024 11:11:25
    On 04 Jan 2024 at 09:42a, tenser pondered and said...

    RIP Niklaus Wirth, 1934-2024.

    Wirth was the inventor of the Algol/W, Pascal, Modula-2, and
    Oberon programming languages, the Oberon operating system,
    the Lilith workstation, and so much more. It is impossible
    to overstate his importance to modern computing.

    We have lost a giant.

    :( RIP Indeed.... sad news..

    Kerr Avon [Blake's 7] 'I'm not expendable, I'm not stupid and I'm not going' avon[at]bbs.nz | bbs.nz | fsxnet.nz

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  • From Bob Worm@21:1/205 to poindexter FORTRAN on Thursday, January 04, 2024 23:06:50
    Re: Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
    By: poindexter FORTRAN to tenser on Thu Jan 04 2024 06:35:00

    RIP Niklaus Wirth, 1934-2024.

    Anyone who studied CS in the 90s on probably started off with Pascal -
    not sure about nowadays.

    Certainly accurate in my case, at the very end of the 90s. I loved Pascal back then and really couldn't see why people preferred C. I think I switched to C when I started using Linux - GCC was a lot easier to lay my hands on than... whatever the good Pascal compiler was!

    I am sure the very first demo coding tutorial I ever saw was in Pascal as well - I would love to lay my hands on that again.

    BobW
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  • From Nightfox@21:1/137 to Bob Worm on Thursday, January 04, 2024 20:12:50
    Re: Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
    By: Bob Worm to poindexter FORTRAN on Thu Jan 04 2024 11:06 pm

    Anyone who studied CS in the 90s on probably started off with Pascal - not
    sure about nowadays.

    Certainly accurate in my case, at the very end of the 90s. I loved Pascal back then and really couldn't see why people preferred C. I think I switched to C when I started using Linux - GCC was a lot easier to lay my hands on than... whatever the good Pascal compiler was!

    I took a few CS programming classes in college in 1999-2000, and they were teaching C++. I ended up going into a software engineering program. I never had any Pascal classes in college.

    Nightfox
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  • From NuSkooler@21:1/121 to tenser on Thursday, January 04, 2024 20:37:04

    tenser around Friday, January 5th...
    RIP Niklaus Wirth, 1934-2024.

    Was readin this earlier today, RIP :( I wrote a LOT in Pascal for many years, and even did a lot of Delphi professionally later. It's really what fully got me into being a developer

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  • From esc@21:4/173 to Bob Worm on Thursday, January 04, 2024 20:50:20
    Certainly accurate in my case, at the very end of the 90s. I loved
    Pascal back then and really couldn't see why people preferred C. I think
    I switched to C when I started using Linux - GCC was a lot easier to lay my hands on than... whatever the good Pascal compiler was!

    Conversely I missed the Pascal bus :P I dabbled when I was 13 years old or so but quickly moved on to C when I started using linux as a daily driver.

    Oddly enough BBSing was the impetus for my curiosity in coding :P

    I'd still like to go learn Pascal simply because of how prominent it was in all things BBSing, and the amount of Pascal sources related to BBSes are out there floating around. I wonder how long it'd take.

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  • From Jaguar@21:5/100 to Tenser on Thursday, January 04, 2024 11:38:26
    RIP Niklaus Wirth, 1934-2024.

    Wirth was the inventor of the Algol/W, Pascal, Modula-2, and
    Oberon programming languages, the Oberon operating system,
    the Lilith workstation, and so much more. It is impossible
    to overstate his importance to modern computing.

    We have lost a giant.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

    My condolences to his friends and family.
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  • From Dr. What@21:1/616 to Bob Worm on Friday, January 05, 2024 08:05:32
    Bob Worm wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

    Certainly accurate in my case, at the very end of the 90s. I loved
    Pascal back then and really couldn't see why people preferred C.

    Because of Turbo Pascal. Pascal was designed to be an efficient, one pass compile, language and it lived up to it. Turbo Pascal was a great tool that produced efficient code.

    But it had its limitations and by the time they corrected them, people were used to C.


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  • From Blue White@21:4/134 to poindexter FORTRAN on Friday, January 05, 2024 09:28:29
    Wirth was the inventor of the Algol/W, Pascal, Modula-2, and
    Oberon programming languages, the Oberon operating system,
    the Lilith workstation, and so much more. It is impossible
    to overstate his importance to modern computing.

    Anyone who studied CS in the 90s on probably started off with Pascal -
    not sure about nowadays.

    We were still required to take BASIC, with Pascal offered as an elective,
    but I suspect that the school I went to was a little behind the times.



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  • From poindexter FORTRAN@21:4/122 to Nightfox on Friday, January 05, 2024 06:33:00
    Nightfox wrote to Bob Worm <=-

    I took a few CS programming classes in college in 1999-2000, and they
    were teaching C++. I ended up going into a software engineering
    program. I never had any Pascal classes in college.

    That's really strange. Most CS curricula when I was starting out had a structured language class as the first class, it was sort of a weed-out
    class and taught in Pascal. They later switched (in my case) to ANSI C.
    This was before c++.



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  • From poindexter FORTRAN@21:4/122 to esc on Friday, January 05, 2024 06:34:00
    esc wrote to Bob Worm <=-

    I'd still like to go learn Pascal simply because of how prominent it
    was in all things BBSing, and the amount of Pascal sources related to BBSes are out there floating around. I wonder how long it'd take.

    Not long. Simplicity is its forte compared to something like C. It might
    feel less flexible to code in, but you should be able to walk through
    code, like the old FORUM-BBS code, pretty easily.



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  • From poindexter FORTRAN@21:4/122 to Dr. What on Friday, January 05, 2024 06:36:00
    Dr. What wrote to Bob Worm <=-

    Because of Turbo Pascal. Pascal was designed to be an efficient, one
    pass compile, language and it lived up to it. Turbo Pascal was a great tool that produced efficient code.


    Tiny, too.

    (From https://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html)

    The entire Turbo Pascal 3.02 executable--the compiler and IDE--was
    39,731 bytes. How does that stack up in 2011 terms? Here are some things
    that Turbo Pascal is smaller than, as of October 30, 2011:

    The minified version of jquery 1.6 (90,518 bytes).

    The yahoo.com home page (219,583 bytes).

    The image of the white iPhone 4S at apple.com (190,157 bytes).

    zlib.h in the Mac OS X Lion SDK (80,504 bytes).

    The touch command under OS X Lion (44,016 bytes).

    Various vim quick reference cards as PDFs. (This one is 47,508 bytes.)

    The compiled code for the Erlang R14B02 parser (erl_parse.beam, 286,324
    bytes).

    The Wikipedia page for C++ (214,251 bytes).




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  • From Nightfox@21:1/137 to poindexter FORTRAN on Friday, January 05, 2024 09:42:08
    Re: Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
    By: poindexter FORTRAN to Nightfox on Fri Jan 05 2024 06:33 am

    I took a few CS programming classes in college in 1999-2000, and they
    were teaching C++. I ended up going into a software engineering program.
    I never had any Pascal classes in college.

    That's really strange. Most CS curricula when I was starting out had a structured language class as the first class, it was sort of a weed-out class and taught in Pascal. They later switched (in my case) to ANSI C. This was before c++.

    That's interesting.. For the software engineering program I went into later, for the first term, they didn't even have us do any programming, but they went over software design concepts (including object-oriented design), and the next term, they went right into C++.

    Nightfox
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  • From Ben Collver@21:2/101 to poindexter FORTRAN on Friday, January 05, 2024 13:27:41
    Re: Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
    By: poindexter FORTRAN to Dr. What on Fri Jan 05 2024 06:36:00

    Tiny, too.

    (From https://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html)

    The entire Turbo Pascal 3.02 executable--the compiler and IDE--was
    39,731 bytes. How does that stack up in 2011 terms? Here are some things that Turbo Pascal is smaller than, as of October 30, 2011:

    Thanks! I enjoyed reading that. :-)
    I learned Pascal because that's what they taught at school.
    My first PC had no fixed disk, only 5-1/4" floppies
    It was important for software to be small like this.
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  • From tenser@21:1/101 to esc on Saturday, January 06, 2024 08:58:37
    On 04 Jan 2024 at 08:50p, esc pondered and said...

    I'd still like to go learn Pascal simply because of how prominent it was in all things BBSing, and the amount of Pascal sources related to BBSes are out there floating around. I wonder how long it'd take.

    As others have mentioned, it's not too hard to pick up
    Pascal, by design. It was meant to be a teaching
    language, so it's single-pass, pretty simple. Most of
    the dialects that were actually useful for things like
    BBS software had extensions with things like strings,
    that weren't really in the original language.

    Interestingly, much of the early Apple systems software
    on the Lisa and the Mac was written in Pascal. Wirth
    himself was brought in to extend the language to make it
    suitable as a systems programming language.

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  • From Spectre@21:3/101 to Blue White on Saturday, January 06, 2024 06:09:00
    We were still required to take BASIC, with Pascal offered as an elective, but I suspect that the school I went to was a little behind the times.

    Mine was much the same. Basic, touching on other stuff.. pascal was probably the most likely, the rest just rating mentions. I suspect it reflects more
    on the age of the people writing the texts at the time. This is mid to late 80s...

    Spec


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  • From Blue White@21:4/134 to Spectre on Saturday, January 06, 2024 08:56:13
    We were still required to take BASIC, with Pascal offered as an
    elective,
    but I suspect that the school I went to was a little behind the
    times.

    Mine was much the same. Basic, touching on other stuff.. pascal was probably
    the most likely, the rest just rating mentions. I suspect it reflects
    more
    on the age of the people writing the texts at the time. This is mid
    to late 80s...

    I was late 80s/early 90s, so maybe. I took PASCAL as an elective and
    spent most of the class trying to figure out if anything I was learning
    could be applied to my BBS. :D



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  • From Dr. What@21:1/616 to Blue White on Saturday, January 06, 2024 09:55:32
    Blue White wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

    We were still required to take BASIC, with Pascal offered as an
    elective, but I suspect that the school I went to was a little behind
    the times.

    Wow, ya a little behind the times. :)

    BASIC for me was only high school. But that's because we had Commodore PETs with only some having floppy drives.

    College started with FORTRAN, but we quickly moved to Pascal. In my Junior year, they dropped FORTRAN for Computer Science majors. (Which was a bummer. It was because I knew FORTRAN that I got my first real programming job.)


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  • From Dr. What@21:1/616 to Ben Collver on Saturday, January 06, 2024 09:55:32
    Ben Collver wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

    I learned Pascal because that's what they taught at school.
    My first PC had no fixed disk, only 5-1/4" floppies
    It was important for software to be small like this.

    I still have an "Oh! Pascal!" book and Turbo Pascal for my NuXT and CP/M systems.


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  • From poindexter FORTRAN@21:4/122 to Nightfox on Saturday, January 06, 2024 09:43:00
    Nightfox wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

    That's interesting.. For the software engineering program I went into later, for the first term, they didn't even have us do any programming, but they went over software design concepts (including object-oriented design), and the next term, they went right into C++.

    That makes sense, the PASCAL class was used mostly to teach data
    structures and algorithms, then everything else was in C, assembler or
    LISP. In retrospect I'd rather just jump into C or C++ instead of
    spending time learning another language.



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  • From Bob Worm@21:1/205 to poindexter FORTRAN on Saturday, January 06, 2024 22:27:58
    Re: Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
    By: poindexter FORTRAN to Nightfox on Sat Jan 06 2024 09:43:00

    That makes sense, the PASCAL class was used mostly to teach data
    structures and algorithms, then everything else was in C, assembler or
    LISP. In retrospect I'd rather just jump into C or C++ instead of
    spending time learning another language.

    Ah, yes - this gives me flashbacks. In my Computer Science degree, which turned out to be mostly abstract mathematics, we used Pascal for the module which introduced recursion, linked lists, binary trees and so on. Pass by reference vs. pass by value and all that good stuff. To be fair I can see why, trying to learn that stuff for the first time while also trying to learn C's syntax for the first time would be a ballache - I have to do *what* to create a string? Do I need *var or var* in this context? Not to mention fun stuff like "if(x = 0)" compiling fine, even though you clearly want "if(x == 0)", then doing bonkers things at runtime.

    It's a shame that was the last time I used Pascal :(

    BobW
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  • From tenser@21:1/101 to poindexter FORTRAN on Monday, January 08, 2024 03:51:31
    On 06 Jan 2024 at 09:43a, poindexter FORTRAN pondered and said...

    That makes sense, the PASCAL class was used mostly to teach data structures and algorithms, then everything else was in C, assembler or LISP. In retrospect I'd rather just jump into C or C++ instead of
    spending time learning another language.

    Honestly, at this point, I can't think of a good reason
    to teach C at the collegiate level. Intro classes should
    arguably be in a functional language of some kind; I like
    Scheme, but Racket would be better; barring that, OCaml
    or even SML would work well.

    For low-level details, I'd teach assembler on RISC-V, and
    then follow up with Rust or Go; maybe Zig.

    C's goal of being, essentially, a "portable macro assembler"
    hasn't been true since the late 1970s, and the language is
    a minefield of subtlety and undefined behavior that means a
    program will work _most_ of the time, until it doesn't, and
    then you need someone who's really studied the language
    standard to figure out why.

    Things change over time. Universities used to teach COBOL
    to CS students; now they don't. Pascal was favored for a
    time, now it isn't. Java even made a play for a while. C
    is similar.

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  • From poindexter FORTRAN@21:4/122 to tenser on Sunday, January 07, 2024 08:00:00
    tenser wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

    Honestly, at this point, I can't think of a good reason
    to teach C at the collegiate level. Intro classes should
    arguably be in a functional language of some kind; I like
    Scheme, but Racket would be better; barring that, OCaml
    or even SML would work well.

    It is in much more common use than any of the other languages, so
    having some marketable experience is a good thing.

    For low-level details, I'd teach assembler on RISC-V, and
    then follow up with Rust or Go; maybe Zig.

    I learned assembler on a VAX. Nice instruction set, but we only had a
    handful of serial ports for a ton of students. I became a night-owl that semester, logging on from 2-6am to get my work done.

    Things change over time. Universities used to teach COBOL
    to CS students; now they don't. Pascal was favored for a
    time, now it isn't. Java even made a play for a while. C
    is similar.

    My university started a business/CS degree, they learned COBOL, PC
    databases and the like. It might have been a more useful degree for me
    than my "hard" CS degree.




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  • From Dr. What@21:1/616 to poindexter FORTRAN on Sunday, January 07, 2024 11:42:30
    poindexter FORTRAN wrote to Nightfox <=-

    That makes sense, the PASCAL class was used mostly to teach data structures and algorithms, then everything else was in C, assembler or LISP. In retrospect I'd rather just jump into C or C++ instead of
    spending time learning another language.

    Pascal was intended to be a teaching language that taught you good programming practice. So that when you got to C/C++, and didn't have the seatbelts that Pascal gave you, you didn't kill yourself when your program crashed.


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  • From Nightfox@21:1/137 to poindexter FORTRAN on Sunday, January 07, 2024 14:00:33
    Re: Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
    By: poindexter FORTRAN to Nightfox on Sat Jan 06 2024 09:43 am

    That's interesting.. For the software engineering program I went into
    later, for the first term, they didn't even have us do any programming,
    but they went over software design concepts (including object-oriented
    design), and the next term, they went right into C++.

    That makes sense, the PASCAL class was used mostly to teach data structures and algorithms, then everything else was in C, assembler or LISP. In retrospect I'd rather just jump into C or C++ instead of spending time learning another language.

    I think I'd prefer that as well. And they used C to teach data structures and algorithms. I thought that class was interesting.

    Nightfox
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  • From Nightfox@21:1/137 to tenser on Sunday, January 07, 2024 14:04:49
    Re: Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
    By: tenser to poindexter FORTRAN on Mon Jan 08 2024 03:51 am

    Honestly, at this point, I can't think of a good reason to teach C at the collegiate level. Intro classes should arguably be in a functional language of some kind; I like Scheme, but Racket would be better; barring that, OCaml or even SML would work well.

    I haven't heard of Scheme, Racket, OCaml or SML.. Are those fairly new languages? I think one of the reasons for teaching C (or C++), at least at the time, was that those languages were in fairly wide use in the industry. I've been hearing they're being used less, but at the same time, they're still fairly popular languages due to the amount of older code in existence. And I've heard C is especially popular for embedded software.

    Nightfox
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  • From tenser@21:1/101 to poindexter FORTRAN on Monday, January 08, 2024 15:58:14
    On 07 Jan 2024 at 08:00a, poindexter FORTRAN pondered and said...

    tenser wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

    Honestly, at this point, I can't think of a good reason
    to teach C at the collegiate level. Intro classes should
    arguably be in a functional language of some kind; I like
    Scheme, but Racket would be better; barring that, OCaml
    or even SML would work well.

    It is in much more common use than any of the other languages, so
    having some marketable experience is a good thing.

    By that metric, Java, JavaScript (excuse me, ECMAscript)
    and C++ are all more common than C itself; probably C#,
    Python, and maybe even Visual Basic still. I can appreciate
    some marketable skill, but I'd counter that a) course-level
    experience with a language often doesn't count, and b) with
    a solid footing gleaned from other languages, I'd expect C
    to be relatively easy to pick up to a reasonable level of
    competency.

    For low-level details, I'd teach assembler on RISC-V, and
    then follow up with Rust or Go; maybe Zig.

    I learned assembler on a VAX. Nice instruction set, but we only had a handful of serial ports for a ton of students. I became a night-owl that semester, logging on from 2-6am to get my work done.

    I liked the VAX instruction set, but a few of them were
    weird. EDITPC, the POLY instructions (really? A dedicated
    instruction for finding the roots of arbitrary polynomials?),
    and the queue instructions were kind of out there on the
    complexity spectrum. And then MOVC3 could cause something
    like 24 page lookups or something wild thing like that.

    Things change over time. Universities used to teach COBOL
    to CS students; now they don't. Pascal was favored for a
    time, now it isn't. Java even made a play for a while. C
    is similar.

    My university started a business/CS degree, they learned COBOL, PC databases and the like. It might have been a more useful degree for me than my "hard" CS degree.

    Yeah, a lot of MIS/CIS places continued to teach COBOL for
    a long time. I wonder what they teach now....

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  • From tenser@21:1/101 to Dr. What on Monday, January 08, 2024 16:00:00
    On 07 Jan 2024 at 11:42a, Dr. What pondered and said...

    poindexter FORTRAN wrote to Nightfox <=-

    That makes sense, the PASCAL class was used mostly to teach data structures and algorithms, then everything else was in C, assembler o LISP. In retrospect I'd rather just jump into C or C++ instead of spending time learning another language.

    Pascal was intended to be a teaching language that taught you good programming practice. So that when you got to C/C++, and didn't have
    the seatbelts that Pascal gave you, you didn't kill yourself when your program crashed.

    It was always easy to pick out the kids who'd been
    exposed to COBOL and then learned C; their C code
    tended to be overly verbose and not terribly idiomatic.
    It'd take them a good while to come up to speed.

    The ones who came from BASIC had it the worst, though.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)
  • From tenser@21:1/101 to Nightfox on Monday, January 08, 2024 16:06:42
    On 07 Jan 2024 at 02:04p, Nightfox pondered and said...

    Re: Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
    By: tenser to poindexter FORTRAN on Mon Jan 08 2024 03:51 am

    Honestly, at this point, I can't think of a good reason to teach C at collegiate level. Intro classes should arguably be in a functional language of some kind; I like Scheme, but Racket would be better; bar that, OCaml or even SML would work well.

    I haven't heard of Scheme, Racket, OCaml or SML.. Are those fairly new languages?

    Hmm, not really. The two newest are Racket and OCaml, which
    date from 1995 and 1996, respectively. Scheme and SML are
    from the 70s and 80s, respectively. Racket and Scheme are both
    dialects of Lisp, and are closely related; OCaml and SML are
    from the ML family of languages, and also closely related.

    I think one of the reasons for teaching C (or C++), at least
    at the time, was that those languages were in fairly wide use in the industry. I've been hearing they're being used less, but at the same time, they're still fairly popular languages due to the amount of older code in existence. And I've heard C is especially popular for embedded software.

    They're still used quite a bit, but with memory safety
    coming up as a big issue, and for that matter with the
    US government starting to introduce legislation to limit
    the use of memory unsafe languages in government, their
    use is likely to decline faster (at least as usually
    written).

    (And yes, Congress has recently introduced a bill
    directing the DoD to come up with a plan to limit the
    use of memory unsafe languages like C and C++.)

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)
  • From hollowone@21:2/150 to Nightfox on Monday, January 08, 2024 03:35:04
    I took a few CS programming classes in college in 1999-2000, and they
    were teaching C++. I ended up going into a software engineering
    program. I never had any Pascal classes in college.

    I think that's the time where all schools successfuly adopted Windows and dropped MSDOS in its curriculum. Pascal (and Borland's compilers and tools specifically) was dominant in MS-DOS times.

    I also remember when Win9x really kicked in and during Windows 2000 definitively it was already Visual Studio/C era or emerging Java in schools.

    Some tried Delphi, but only for some DB apps.. Delphi never was as universal as Borland/Turbo Pascal could be. I believe one of the reasons of Borland's demise, shortly after.

    -h1

    ... Xerox Alto was the thing. Anything after we use is just a mere copy.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: 2o fOr beeRS bbs>>>20ForBeers.com:1337 (21:2/150)
  • From Dr. What@21:1/616 to tenser on Monday, January 08, 2024 08:05:19
    tenser wrote to Dr. What <=-

    It was always easy to pick out the kids who'd been
    exposed to COBOL and then learned C; their C code
    tended to be overly verbose and not terribly idiomatic.
    It'd take them a good while to come up to speed.

    For me, the "tell" was no local variables and functions had a huge number of parameters and sub-functions. But I think that goes with the "not terribly idiomatic" category.

    Did you know that 'lint' crashes if you have too many local variables?
    I didn't until I had to run some C-COBOL through it.

    The ones who came from BASIC had it the worst, though.

    It depends, but you're mostly right.

    I learned BASIC on my own. But by the end of High School, I had already "discovered" Structured Programming (before I even knew who Edsger Dijkstra was), using GOSUB and minimizing GOTOs. Commodore BASIC didn't have WHILE/WEND loops until much later.


    ... Debrief: Wife listening while you talk in your sleep.
    ___ MultiMail/Linux v0.52

    --- Mystic BBS/QWK v1.12 A47 2021/12/25 (Windows/32)
    * Origin: cold fusion - cfbbs.net - grand rapids, mi (21:1/616)
  • From poindexter FORTRAN@21:4/122 to tenser on Monday, January 08, 2024 06:19:00
    tenser wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

    Yeah, a lot of MIS/CIS places continued to teach COBOL for
    a long time. I wonder what they teach now....

    If I were freelancing, I wouldn't mind having a business process control language like COBOL or RPG in my toolkit. I wouldn't want to rely on it,
    mind you...



    ... It is quite possible (after all)
    --- MultiMail/Win v0.52
    * Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)
  • From poindexter FORTRAN@21:4/122 to tenser on Monday, January 08, 2024 06:26:00
    tenser wrote to Dr. What <=-

    It was always easy to pick out the kids who'd been
    exposed to COBOL and then learned C; their C code
    tended to be overly verbose and not terribly idiomatic.
    It'd take them a good while to come up to speed.

    I suppose learning Pascal helped - subroutines defined first, no
    GOTOs...

    All the coding I did in college and the only code I have remaining from
    that time is the original DOS batch file for my BBS, all errorlevel
    jumps and GOTOs...



    ... It is quite possible (after all)
    --- MultiMail/Win v0.52
    * Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)
  • From poindexter FORTRAN@21:4/122 to hollowone on Monday, January 08, 2024 06:30:00
    hollowone wrote to Nightfox <=-

    Some tried Delphi, but only for some DB apps.. Delphi never was as universal as Borland/Turbo Pascal could be. I believe one of the
    reasons of Borland's demise, shortly after.

    I live near Santa Cruz, and drive by the old Borland building
    occasionally, Seagate's old office (the address was 1 disk drive...) and
    where I took a UNIX training class at SCO.

    A friend of mine went sailing on Philippe Kahn's sailboat a few years
    ago, just before Covid. Apparently life after Borland is treating him
    well.

    ... It is quite possible (after all)
    --- MultiMail/Win v0.52
    * Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)
  • From tenser@21:1/101 to Dr. What on Tuesday, January 09, 2024 04:56:41
    On 08 Jan 2024 at 08:05a, Dr. What pondered and said...

    tenser wrote to Dr. What <=-

    It was always easy to pick out the kids who'd been
    exposed to COBOL and then learned C; their C code
    tended to be overly verbose and not terribly idiomatic.
    It'd take them a good while to come up to speed.

    For me, the "tell" was no local variables and functions had a huge
    number of parameters and sub-functions. But I think that goes with the "not terribly idiomatic" category.

    For me, it was always the loop structure and not using
    the library effectively.

    Did you know that 'lint' crashes if you have too many local variables?
    I didn't until I had to run some C-COBOL through it.

    I totally believe that. It was a research prototype,
    after all!

    The ones who came from BASIC had it the worst, though.

    It depends, but you're mostly right.

    I learned BASIC on my own. But by the end of High School, I had already "discovered" Structured Programming (before I even knew who Edsger Dijkstra was), using GOSUB and minimizing GOTOs. Commodore BASIC didn't have WHILE/WEND loops until much later.

    Yeah. A lot of folks who self-taught themselves BASIC
    on 8 and 16 bit micros picked up better practices, but
    they were in such a constrained environment it was hard
    for them take advantage of more advanced structures.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)
  • From tenser@21:1/101 to poindexter FORTRAN on Tuesday, January 09, 2024 04:58:26
    On 08 Jan 2024 at 06:19a, poindexter FORTRAN pondered and said...

    tenser wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

    Yeah, a lot of MIS/CIS places continued to teach COBOL for
    a long time. I wonder what they teach now....

    If I were freelancing, I wouldn't mind having a business process control language like COBOL or RPG in my toolkit. I wouldn't want to rely on it, mind you...

    Hey, with IBM pushing AI to translate those piles of
    dusty COBOL into Java, maybe you'd never need it!

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)
  • From Bob Worm@21:1/205 to Dr. What on Monday, January 08, 2024 16:54:54
    Re: Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
    By: Dr. What to tenser on Mon Jan 08 2024 08:05:19

    I learned BASIC on my own. But by the end of High School, I had already "discovered" Structured Programming (before I even knew who Edsger Dijkstra was), using GOSUB and minimizing GOTOs. Commodore BASIC didn't have WHILE/WEND loops until much later.

    I spent a lot of my time ages 8-12 poking and bodging around in BASIC, I persisted because I enjoyed it but I barely understood what an array was so you can imagine the code quality. I sometimes think life could have been much different if my parents had bought me *one* book on the basics of coding... or even borrowed one from the library! Then ditched that to play games for a few years before briefly applying my amazing spaghetti code skills to x86 assembler.

    Leaving to university still not really sure why GOTOs were bad was probably not an ideal starting position!

    BobW
    --- SBBSecho 3.20-Linux
    * Origin: >>> Magnum BBS <<< - bbs.magnum.uk.net (21:1/205)
  • From Nightfox@21:1/137 to tenser on Monday, January 08, 2024 09:32:18
    Re: Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
    By: tenser to Nightfox on Mon Jan 08 2024 04:06 pm

    They're still used quite a bit, but with memory safety coming up as a big issue, and for that matter with the US government starting to introduce legislation to limit the use of memory unsafe languages in government, their use is likely to decline faster (at least as usually written).

    (And yes, Congress has recently introduced a bill directing the DoD to come up with a plan to limit the use of memory unsafe languages like C and C++.)

    Interesting.. For C++, there have been some new things introduced to the standard library to help with dynamic memory management. Some such things are helper classes unique_ptr, shared_ptr, and similar, which manage a dynamically-allocated object for you (i.e., the memory will be freed when the helper object goes out of scope and it's the last to reference the memory, etc.). I've even seen some C++ developers say they don't have to write a 'delete' statement anymore.

    Nightfox
    --- SBBSecho 3.20-Linux
    * Origin: Digital Distortion: digdist.synchro.net (21:1/137)
  • From Nightfox@21:1/137 to hollowone on Monday, January 08, 2024 09:35:12
    Re: Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
    By: hollowone to Nightfox on Mon Jan 08 2024 03:35 am

    I took a few CS programming classes in college in 1999-2000, and they
    were teaching C++. I ended up going into a software engineering program.
    I never had any Pascal classes in college.

    I think that's the time where all schools successfuly adopted Windows and dropped MSDOS in its curriculum. Pascal (and Borland's compilers and tools specifically) was dominant in MS-DOS times.

    I started college in early 1999, and any computer instruction was typically using Windows. The college I started at had a computer lab that was mostly Windows PCs, and a section of Mac desktops.

    One thing that I've found odd is that in some programming forums on Facebook & such, there have been some students asking questions and saying their instructor was having them use Borland Turbo C++ for DOS - And this was well into the 2010s.

    Nightfox
    --- SBBSecho 3.20-Linux
    * Origin: Digital Distortion: digdist.synchro.net (21:1/137)
  • From tenser@21:1/101 to Nightfox on Tuesday, January 09, 2024 08:33:13
    On 08 Jan 2024 at 09:32a, Nightfox pondered and said...

    Re: Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
    By: tenser to Nightfox on Mon Jan 08 2024 04:06 pm

    They're still used quite a bit, but with memory safety coming up as a issue, and for that matter with the US government starting to introdu legislation to limit the use of memory unsafe languages in government their use is likely to decline faster (at least as usually written).

    (And yes, Congress has recently introduced a bill directing the DoD t come up with a plan to limit the use of memory unsafe languages like C++.)

    Interesting.. For C++, there have been some new things introduced to the standard library to help with dynamic memory management. Some such
    things are helper classes unique_ptr, shared_ptr, and similar, which manage a dynamically-allocated object for you (i.e., the memory will be freed when the helper object goes out of scope and it's the last to reference the memory, etc.). I've even seen some C++ developers say
    they don't have to write a 'delete' statement anymore.

    Heh, funny you should mention that.... I was just drafting
    a post to a former colleague over on the WELL; he'd posted
    a link to a video of a presentation Bjarne gave at CppCon a
    month or so ago about safety and C++.

    There are two issues at play, though. 1) backwards
    compatibility with piles of existing C++ code. That's not
    going away any time soon, and means that while you can
    make C++ code somewhat safer (and you should!) the rough
    edges in the language that make e.g. memory safety
    fundamentally unsound will remain. 2) someone still needs
    to go back through the piles and piles of C++ code and
    update it to use the safer features, which is not a small
    undertaking. Stroustrup has hopes for the Profiles thing
    he's pushing; I wish him well.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)
  • From hollowone@21:2/150 to poindexter FORTRAN on Monday, January 08, 2024 13:21:02
    I live near Santa Cruz, and drive by the old Borland building occasionally, Seagate's old office (the address was 1 disk drive...) and where I took a UNIX training class at SCO.

    A friend of mine went sailing on Philippe Kahn's sailboat a few years
    ago, just before Covid. Apparently life after Borland is treating him well.


    Cool ;-) I suppose that's called retirement :)

    -h1

    ... Xerox Alto was the thing. Anything after we use is just a mere copy.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: 2o fOr beeRS bbs>>>20ForBeers.com:1337 (21:2/150)
  • From hollowone@21:2/150 to Nightfox on Monday, January 08, 2024 13:23:52
    One thing that I've found odd is that in some programming forums on Facebook & such, there have been some students asking questions and
    saying their instructor was having them use Borland Turbo C++ for DOS - And this was well into the 2010s.

    Maybe the course was "History of programming" :)
    Or something retro. Some ghost-haunted teachers on universities in my country also introduce retro languages and tools for fun. Especially if they were demosceners in the past. I know one who runs a course how to make visual effects on Amiga this year!

    Nothing practical, outside pure skill of logical thinking... but yeah.. if all that is optional, maybe somebody will find a reason :D

    -h1

    ... Xerox Alto was the thing. Anything after we use is just a mere copy.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: 2o fOr beeRS bbs>>>20ForBeers.com:1337 (21:2/150)
  • From unixl0rd@21:2/150 to tenser on Monday, January 08, 2024 18:16:16
    time, now it isn't. Java even made a play for a while. C

    Yup, Java was the first programming language they taught to us. I don't miss it at all.

    ... If it wasn't for C, we would be using BASI, PASAL and OBOL!

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: 2o fOr beeRS bbs>>>20ForBeers.com:1337 (21:2/150)
  • From Nightfox@21:1/137 to unixl0rd on Monday, January 08, 2024 19:02:18
    Re: Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
    By: unixl0rd to tenser on Mon Jan 08 2024 06:16 pm

    time, now it isn't. Java even made a play for a while. C

    Yup, Java was the first programming language they taught to us. I don't miss it at all.

    As a junior in college, I took a class about Java server-side programming with Java servlets & such. I remember the teacher mentioning a couple of Java functions, activate() and passivate(), and one of the students said "passivate? To make passive..?" :P

    Nightfox
    --- SBBSecho 3.20-Linux
    * Origin: Digital Distortion: digdist.synchro.net (21:1/137)
  • From hollowone@21:2/150 to unixl0rd on Tuesday, January 09, 2024 01:43:06
    Yup, Java was the first programming language they taught to us. I don't miss it at all.

    Java as a programming language isn't bad at all.. but the toolset it comes with, and programming frameworks.. a fucking nightmare.

    Unfortunately the same is happening to .NET. Instead of being crisp, consistent, integrated... it becomes more a community than a platform.

    I'm not surprised that things like Rust, Go, Elixir, Crystal, Zig show up and become more and more successfully.

    Once per decade somebody just needs to de-clutter the bloat!

    Funny thing for me that I keep experimenting with new languages occasionally but then out of the sudden I keep coming back to C.

    It's brutal, yet so simple and elegant.. if you know what you're doing and you know your compiler and OS/platform well! That's the only condition, which of course also terrifies many.

    -h1

    ... Xerox Alto was the thing. Anything after we use is just a mere copy.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: 2o fOr beeRS bbs>>>20ForBeers.com:1337 (21:2/150)
  • From Bob Worm@21:1/205 to hollowone on Tuesday, January 09, 2024 10:13:15
    Re: Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
    By: hollowone to Nightfox on Mon Jan 08 2024 13:23:52

    Hi, hollowone

    Maybe the course was "History of programming" :)
    Or something retro. Some ghost-haunted teachers on universities in my country also introduce retro languages and tools for fun. Especially if they were demosceners in the past. I know one who runs a course how to make visual effects on Amiga this year!

    That's truly amazing to me. I have been hunting around for any kind of "introduction to demoscene coding" type content for months now and found very little online. I'd love to see lectures like this - demoscene techniques presented by someone who teaches for a living...

    When I finally assemble a full collection of "the classics" - your plasmas, bump maps, flames, twisters, etc. and can implement / explain them perhaps I'll put a few videos together myself. But I'm aware my coding is pretty sloppy!

    BobW
    --- SBBSecho 3.20-Linux
    * Origin: >>> Magnum BBS <<< - bbs.magnum.uk.net (21:1/205)
  • From Dr. What@21:1/616 to tenser on Tuesday, January 09, 2024 08:03:29
    tenser wrote to Dr. What <=-

    Yeah. A lot of folks who self-taught themselves BASIC
    on 8 and 16 bit micros picked up better practices, but
    they were in such a constrained environment it was hard
    for them take advantage of more advanced structures.

    But I was always "I need to keep these X things together. That's cumbersome in BASIC." When I got to college and Pascal, I loved the "record".

    So I think that many of us were already thinking along the correct lines in BASIC. We just needed to be exposed to something more advanced.


    ... Never hit a man with glasses. Use your fist!
    ___ MultiMail/Linux v0.52

    --- Mystic BBS/QWK v1.12 A47 2021/12/25 (Windows/32)
    * Origin: cold fusion - cfbbs.net - grand rapids, mi (21:1/616)
  • From Dr. What@21:1/616 to Bob Worm on Tuesday, January 09, 2024 08:03:29
    Bob Worm wrote to Dr. What <=-

    Leaving to university still not really sure why GOTOs were bad was probably not an ideal starting position!

    Ha! Probably not.

    When I was in high school, by the time they formally taught programming, there were a number of us who knew more than the teacher. The teacher was smart and made friends with us and we helped things along in the computer lab.

    But he also gave us more challenging assignments than the "regular" class. One day, one of the "regulars" wanted to see my program. His only comment was "there's only 3 GOTOs". I responded with "Ya, that's all I needed." and he was really confused.

    But then I realize that the first program that they get taught is
    10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD ";
    20 GOTO 10

    and they must get a subconscious idea that GOTOs should be as numerous as PRINTs.


    ... You have been selected for a secret mission.
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    * Origin: cold fusion - cfbbs.net - grand rapids, mi (21:1/616)
  • From Dr. What@21:1/616 to poindexter FORTRAN on Tuesday, January 09, 2024 08:03:29
    poindexter FORTRAN wrote to tenser <=-

    If I were freelancing, I wouldn't mind having a business process
    control language like COBOL or RPG in my toolkit. I wouldn't want to
    rely on it, mind you...

    You never know what will be needed, so it's always good to have multiple tools in your toolbox.

    I know more than a few people who made out really good in 1998/1999 fixing Y2K bugs in COBOL programs. Of course, they were let go in 2000 when everything was working. But by then, they had the money to take time off and get trained in something else.


    ... Today is a good day for you to jump in a lake.
    ___ MultiMail/Linux v0.52

    --- Mystic BBS/QWK v1.12 A47 2021/12/25 (Windows/32)
    * Origin: cold fusion - cfbbs.net - grand rapids, mi (21:1/616)
  • From Dr. What@21:1/616 to poindexter FORTRAN on Tuesday, January 09, 2024 08:03:29
    poindexter FORTRAN wrote to tenser <=-

    I suppose learning Pascal helped - subroutines defined first, no
    GOTOs...

    Pascal had GOTOs.
    But it's use is buried in Appendix A of "Oh! Pascal!".
    And my college prof told us that use of GOTO in our programs was an automatic 0 for the assignment.

    All the coding I did in college and the only code I have remaining from that time is the original DOS batch file for my BBS, all errorlevel
    jumps and GOTOs...

    Lucky you have even something. I have nothing left from that era.


    ... Today is a good day for you to jump in a lake.
    ___ MultiMail/Linux v0.52

    --- Mystic BBS/QWK v1.12 A47 2021/12/25 (Windows/32)
    * Origin: cold fusion - cfbbs.net - grand rapids, mi (21:1/616)
  • From Dr. What@21:1/616 to tenser on Tuesday, January 09, 2024 08:03:29
    tenser wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

    Hey, with IBM pushing AI to translate those piles of
    dusty COBOL into Java, maybe you'd never need it!

    It would be interesting to see that Java code.

    COBOL primarily runs on IBM (or compatible) mainframes. Those mainframes are, in effect, COBOL machines.

    I remember doing assembly language on them and was surprised when I found an assembly command to add 2 packed numbers.

    (For those who don't know, "packed" is something like BCD. The number 1234 would be "packed" into 3 bytes of "01", "23" and "4C" (the "C" is a sign.)

    Every other assembly language I ever encountered only worked on binary format numbers.


    ... A hundred years from now, none of us will give a damn.
    ___ MultiMail/Linux v0.52

    --- Mystic BBS/QWK v1.12 A47 2021/12/25 (Windows/32)
    * Origin: cold fusion - cfbbs.net - grand rapids, mi (21:1/616)
  • From Dr. What@21:1/616 to Nightfox on Tuesday, January 09, 2024 08:03:29
    Nightfox wrote to tenser <=-

    reference the memory, etc.). I've even seen some C++ developers say
    they don't have to write a 'delete' statement anymore.

    ESR did a post a number of years ago when working on Reposurgeon along this line.

    The tl;dr; was that program complexity has risen to a level where we **MUST** use languages that handle their own garbage collection.

    The old saying "Any non-trivial programs contains at least 1 bug" can probably now be said to be "Any program written in a language that doesn't do garbage collection contains at least 1 memory leak."


    ... Help! I've been possessed by a UNIX daemon!
    ___ MultiMail/Linux v0.52

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    * Origin: cold fusion - cfbbs.net - grand rapids, mi (21:1/616)
  • From Dr. What@21:1/616 to Nightfox on Tuesday, January 09, 2024 08:03:29
    Nightfox wrote to hollowone <=-

    One thing that I've found odd is that in some programming forums on Facebook & such, there have been some students asking questions and
    saying their instructor was having them use Borland Turbo C++ for DOS - And this was well into the 2010s.

    Colleges are often behind the times on techology. Mostly due to money.

    When I got to college, my classes were on a Univac 1100/80 and during crunch time, the computer could actually lose your parameters between the main program and the subroutine. Very frustrating - but got you to not wait until crunch time to do your assignment.

    But we also have a problem that I discovered at my previous company: Developers who never had to use a resource constrained system.

    Long story short: The developer pushed 10 lbs of junk though a process designed to handle only 1 lb and gummed up the works. The idea to ask if the process would work for 10 lbs never entered his head.

    For those of who worked on systems who's memory (RAM and Disk) were measured in K, we have a habit of asking those questions.


    ... "640K ought to be enough for anybody." (Bill Gates, 1981)
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    * Origin: cold fusion - cfbbs.net - grand rapids, mi (21:1/616)
  • From poindexter FORTRAN@21:4/122 to tenser on Tuesday, January 09, 2024 06:10:00
    tenser wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

    Hey, with IBM pushing AI to translate those piles of
    dusty COBOL into Java, maybe you'd never need it!

    I don't know, someone needs to run the AI, right? At least for the time being...

    My son is about to graduate with a marketing communications degree. I
    don't think AI is going to render him unemployable, I think the jobs are
    going to change. There won't be tons of human content creators, rather a handful of people who can effectively leverage AI to create content.

    Ditto for coding. If one person managing a LLM can replace a small team,
    people can focus on program logic and let the LLM do the heavy lifting -
    the same way that computers allowed mathmeticians to stop doing the
    repetitive calculations and focus on the big picture.



    ... Always the first steps
    --- MultiMail/Win v0.52
    * Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)
  • From poindexter FORTRAN@21:4/122 to Nightfox on Tuesday, January 09, 2024 06:27:00
    Nightfox wrote to unixl0rd <=-

    As a junior in college, I took a class about Java server-side
    programming with Java servlets & such. I remember the teacher
    mentioning a couple of Java functions, activate() and passivate(), and
    one of the students said "passivate? To make passive..?" :P

    Sounds like classic hacker grammar humor - like optimal/pessimal.

    Or marketing speak, like "A backhoe attenuation caused our network to
    experience sub-optimal routing..."



    ... Change ambiguities to specifics
    --- MultiMail/Win v0.52
    * Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)
  • From poindexter FORTRAN@21:4/122 to Dr. What on Tuesday, January 09, 2024 06:31:00
    Dr. What wrote to Bob Worm <=-

    When I was in high school, by the time they formally taught
    programming, there were a number of us who knew more than the teacher.
    The teacher was smart and made friends with us and we helped things
    along in the computer lab.

    My first programming class in college was in FORTRAN. The professor
    handed me and another student some complex, real-world assignments that
    we took on - one of them was a program that predicted flow of
    underwater aquifers.

    Later, I realized he had a consulting gig and was using us as junior
    talent and charging for our time. We got a A+ grades in the class.

    The class and the language are history, but the handle lives on...



    ... Remove ambiguities and convert to specifics
    --- MultiMail/Win v0.52
    * Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)
  • From poindexter FORTRAN@21:4/122 to Dr. What on Tuesday, January 09, 2024 06:35:00
    Dr. What wrote to Nightfox <=-

    Colleges are often behind the times on techology. Mostly due to money.

    And tenured professors. I recall having CS professors telling what it
    was like in the "Real World", when I was finishing up my classes (and
    coding in the real world). What they remembered wasn't what I was
    experiencing.

    When I got to college, my classes were on a Univac 1100/80 and during crunch time, the computer could actually lose your parameters between
    the main program and the subroutine. Very frustrating - but got you to not wait until crunch time to do your assignment.

    I took an assembler class on a VAX that had 80 students and 8 inbound
    ports. 4 were hard-wired to terminals in a lab, the other 4 went into a
    dial-up modem pool. I learned to be a night owl and learned to love
    coffee that semester. I don't remember much of VAX assembler, but still
    stay up late and love coffee. :)

    For those of who worked on systems who's memory (RAM and Disk) were measured in K, we have a habit of asking those questions.

    QEMM and Memmaker come to mind - the time spent trying to eek out a
    couple of more K on the BBS art part and parcel of the '80s and '90s
    for me...



    ... Remove ambiguities and convert to specifics
    --- MultiMail/Win v0.52
    * Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)
  • From Blue White@21:4/134 to tenser on Tuesday, January 09, 2024 10:02:24
    Hey, with IBM pushing AI to translate those piles of
    dusty COBOL into Java, maybe you'd never need it!

    I worked in a shop that was trying to replace COBOL with Java. They
    found that, while Java did well at replacing "screen" programs, they ran
    into difficulties when it came to some of the complex mathematics
    and other heavy processing that happened during their nightly batch
    processing.

    On the same machine, an IBM mainframe, the dusty COBOL code outperformed
    what they were trying to replace it with.

    AI was not the translator in this case... it was a team of COBOL and java developers... but our experience with AI of the time was similar.

    My experience with COBOL vs. what we called "distributed" developers was
    that the latter didn't like COBOL because (1) it didn't have the same "frameworks" that would fill in the code for them (because they couldn't
    code whatever language they were supposedly coding without help), and (2)
    if they could code their language on their own, whatever they were coding
    would be difficult for others to read, understand, or maintain (job
    security).

    COBOL has put food on my table for roughly 27 years now. I am glad I
    learned it.


    --- Talisman v0.51-dev (Linux/armv7l)
    * Origin: possumso.fsxnet.nz * telnet:2123/ssh:2122/ftelnet:80 (21:4/134)
  • From Bob Worm@21:1/205 to Dr. What on Tuesday, January 09, 2024 15:32:29
    Re: Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
    By: Dr. What to Bob Worm on Tue Jan 09 2024 08:03:29

    Hi, Dr. What.

    When I was in high school, by the time they formally taught programming, there were a number of us who knew more than the teacher. The teacher was smart and made friends with us and we helped things along in the computer lab.

    Yeah, I suppose one of those two things would also have helped - either a formal programming class or even, like, one other kid in my year who was interested in it...

    Perhaps as an adult I should try to learn some good practices? My code is very utilitarian - gets the job of the day done but, man, nobody would want to work on it with me!

    BobW
    --- SBBSecho 3.20-Linux
    * Origin: >>> Magnum BBS <<< - bbs.magnum.uk.net (21:1/205)
  • From Bob Worm@21:1/205 to poindexter FORTRAN on Tuesday, January 09, 2024 15:42:23
    Re: Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
    By: poindexter FORTRAN to Dr. What on Tue Jan 09 2024 06:31:00

    Later, I realized he had a consulting gig and was using us as junior
    talent and charging for our time. We got a A+ grades in the class.

    The question is, did figuring that out make you laugh or scowl?

    I think I'd laugh, but you'd only get one for free :)

    BobW
    --- SBBSecho 3.20-Linux
    * Origin: >>> Magnum BBS <<< - bbs.magnum.uk.net (21:1/205)
  • From Nightfox@21:1/137 to Dr. What on Tuesday, January 09, 2024 09:26:33
    Re: Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
    By: Dr. What to Nightfox on Tue Jan 09 2024 08:03 am

    One thing that I've found odd is that in some programming forums on
    Facebook & such, there have been some students asking questions and
    saying their instructor was having them use Borland Turbo C++ for DOS -
    And this was well into the 2010s.

    Colleges are often behind the times on techology. Mostly due to money.

    20+ years behind the times though? The colleges I went to (1999-2005) weren't still using DOS computers. And I'd think for something like software engineering, computer science, etc., they'd need some recent stuff in order to prepare students for real-world work, since the technology changes so often and so fast.

    Nightfox
    --- SBBSecho 3.20-Linux
    * Origin: Digital Distortion: digdist.synchro.net (21:1/137)
  • From hollowone@21:2/150 to Bob Worm on Tuesday, January 09, 2024 10:26:39
    That's truly amazing to me. I have been hunting around for any kind of "introduction to demoscene coding" type content for months now and found very little online. I'd love to see lectures like this - demoscene techniques presented by someone who teaches for a living...

    I have good news and bad news for you.
    Good news that the course I've mentioned is online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNBI3LKWMsM&list=PL-uCI5sq2RyT-WPH8NqA0bd4Q9oN F0sx0

    Bad news is that this coder is Polish and his course is also available only in Polish language. Not sure if YT offers captions from PL to ENG though.

    -h1

    ... Xerox Alto was the thing. Anything after we use is just a mere copy.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: 2o fOr beeRS bbs>>>20ForBeers.com:1337 (21:2/150)
  • From hollowone@21:2/150 to Bob Worm on Tuesday, January 09, 2024 10:29:57
    One more link for you, this time in English:

    https://github.com/cahirwpz/demoscene/tree/master

    -h1

    ... Xerox Alto was the thing. Anything after we use is just a mere copy.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: 2o fOr beeRS bbs>>>20ForBeers.com:1337 (21:2/150)
  • From ogg@21:2/147 to hollowone on Tuesday, January 09, 2024 14:32:49
    On 09 Jan 2024, hollowone said the following...

    That's truly amazing to me. I have been hunting around for any kind of
    "introduction to demoscene coding" type content for months now and fou
    very little online. I'd love to see lectures like this - demoscene techniques presented by someone who teaches for a living...

    I have good news and bad news for you.
    Good news that the course I've mentioned is online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNBI3LKWMsM&list=PL-uCI5sq2RyT-WPH8NqA0bd4Q
    F0sx0

    Bad news is that this coder is Polish and his course is also available only in Polish language. Not sure if YT offers captions from PL to ENG though.

    Just checked and YT said "Subtitles/closed captions not available"

    ogg
    Sysop, Altair IV BBS
    altairiv.ddns.net:2323

    ... When all else fails, read the instructions

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A49 2023/04/30 (Windows/64)
    * Origin: Altair IV BBS (21:2/147)
  • From Bob Worm@21:1/205 to hollowone on Tuesday, January 09, 2024 20:35:46
    Re: Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
    By: hollowone to Bob Worm on Tue Jan 09 2024 10:26:39

    Hi, hollowone.

    I have good news and bad news for you.
    Good news that the course I've mentioned is online: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=JNBI3LKWMsM&list=PL-uCI5sq2RyT-WPH8NqA0bd4Q9oN F0sx0
    Bad news is that this coder is Polish and his course is also available only in Polish language. Not sure if YT offers captions from PL to ENG though.

    Thanks for sharing that. I was hopeful that YouTube would do some translation for me but sadly not - most of the code uses English variable names so it's still possible to understand a small amount :)

    I will have a look through the github and see what I can learn from the code. I've never had an Amiga or done anything with 68k assembler so I probably won't bother with the cross compiler toolchain and emulation containers for now... I'm still pretty amazed at what the Amiga can do, though!

    Thanks again!

    BobW
    --- SBBSecho 3.20-Linux
    * Origin: >>> Magnum BBS <<< - bbs.magnum.uk.net (21:1/205)
  • From tenser@21:1/101 to Dr. What on Wednesday, January 10, 2024 11:03:41
    On 09 Jan 2024 at 08:03a, Dr. What pondered and said...

    tenser wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

    Hey, with IBM pushing AI to translate those piles of
    dusty COBOL into Java, maybe you'd never need it!

    It would be interesting to see that Java code.

    I bet it's not great right now, but I have no real
    insight into that.

    COBOL primarily runs on IBM (or compatible) mainframes. Those
    mainframes are, in effect, COBOL machines.

    I remember doing assembly language on them and was surprised when I
    found an assembly command to add 2 packed numbers.

    (For those who don't know, "packed" is something like BCD. The number 1234 would be "packed" into 3 bytes of "01", "23" and "4C" (the "C" is a sign.)

    Every other assembly language I ever encountered only worked on binary format numbers.

    I'd categorize them more as "business machines" for
    commercial data processing. In that world, packed
    decimal representations were de rigor; the VAX had
    a similar part of the instruction set for a while,
    but it was eventually removed and the operating
    system would emulate it in software if it trapped on
    an illegal instruction from an old binary.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)
  • From tenser@21:1/101 to poindexter FORTRAN on Wednesday, January 10, 2024 13:16:37
    On 09 Jan 2024 at 06:10a, poindexter FORTRAN pondered and said...

    tenser wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

    Hey, with IBM pushing AI to translate those piles of
    dusty COBOL into Java, maybe you'd never need it!

    I don't know, someone needs to run the AI, right? At least for the time being...

    I'm not sure what you mean by "run".... But yeah, right
    now humans are firmly in charge of the whole shebang.

    My son is about to graduate with a marketing communications degree. I don't think AI is going to render him unemployable, I think the jobs are going to change. There won't be tons of human content creators, rather a handful of people who can effectively leverage AI to create content.

    I think the real innovation is going to be treating the AI
    like a tool to augment the human. "Read this report and
    summarize the top 5 most salient points." Something _I_
    would love would be, "absorb this datasheet and emit a set
    of definitions corresponding to the device's hardware
    registers and their values in language X."

    Ditto for coding. If one person managing a LLM can replace a small team, people can focus on program logic and let the LLM do the heavy lifting - the same way that computers allowed mathmeticians to stop doing the repetitive calculations and focus on the big picture.

    Yup. Or the way high-level languages let the programmer
    focus on the algorithms relevant to the problem at hand,
    and not so much which register is in use at which time.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)
  • From tenser@21:1/101 to poindexter FORTRAN on Wednesday, January 10, 2024 13:18:27
    On 09 Jan 2024 at 06:31a, poindexter FORTRAN pondered and said...

    The class and the language are history, but the handle lives on...

    That story was awesome. FORTRAN is everywhere, though!

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)
  • From tenser@21:1/101 to Blue White on Wednesday, January 10, 2024 13:27:22
    On 09 Jan 2024 at 10:02a, Blue White pondered and said...

    Hey, with IBM pushing AI to translate those piles of
    dusty COBOL into Java, maybe you'd never need it!

    I worked in a shop that was trying to replace COBOL with Java. They
    found that, while Java did well at replacing "screen" programs, they ran into difficulties when it came to some of the complex mathematics
    and other heavy processing that happened during their nightly batch processing.

    My sense is that Java programmers favor a style that is
    heavy on frameworks, design patterns, and abstraction,
    often to the point of excess. This yields all sorts of
    efficiency problems, among other things. On the other
    hand, most COBOL code is straightforward transliteration
    of business rules, making it fairly lean. In some sense,
    COBOL might be at a local optimum as a DSL for business
    data processing; I wouldn't use it for much outside of
    that, though, and if I were designing a language for
    similar purposes today, I think it'd look rather different.

    On the same machine, an IBM mainframe, the dusty COBOL code outperformed what they were trying to replace it with.

    Not terribly surprising. Super-abstracted, dependency
    injected, OOP-heavy Java code running in a stack-based
    virtual machine JIT'd to 390 code versus native-compiled
    COBOL.

    AI was not the translator in this case... it was a team of COBOL and java developers... but our experience with AI of the time was similar.

    My experience with COBOL vs. what we called "distributed" developers was that the latter didn't like COBOL because (1) it didn't have the same "frameworks" that would fill in the code for them (because they couldn't code whatever language they were supposedly coding without help), and (2) if they could code their language on their own, whatever they were coding would be difficult for others to read, understand, or maintain (job security).

    Maybe the AI would do better! :-D

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)
  • From Nightfox@21:1/137 to tenser on Tuesday, January 09, 2024 17:22:44
    Re: Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
    By: tenser to Blue White on Wed Jan 10 2024 01:27 pm

    My sense is that Java programmers favor a style that is heavy on frameworks, design patterns, and abstraction, often to the point of excess. This yields all sorts of efficiency problems, among other things.

    I haven't done much with Java (aside from some Android work), but I've seen this with programmers in some other languages too. Sometimes people seem to like to make a bunch of different classes to handle different parts of the behavior, and abstract things into the various classes and to interfaces, etc., and that at least makes it more difficult to learn the codebase for someone new. Sometimes, such designs seem overly complicated.

    Nightfox
    --- SBBSecho 3.20-Linux
    * Origin: Digital Distortion: digdist.synchro.net (21:1/137)
  • From Dr. What@21:1/616 to poindexter FORTRAN on Wednesday, January 10, 2024 08:18:07
    poindexter FORTRAN wrote to Dr. What <=-

    And tenured professors. I recall having CS professors telling what it
    was like in the "Real World", when I was finishing up my classes (and
    coding in the real world). What they remembered wasn't what I was
    experiencing.

    Oh, I hear you on that. I got lucky and got a couple of summer jobs in IT to get a **real** taste of the real world of programming.

    Some of my professors did well to prepare me. Like changing the requirements a little every class. They told us that's what it was like in the Real World and, for the most part, they were right.

    Other profs, though, really had no idea what things were like.
    And none of my college classes prepared me for the office politics.


    ... Sure I can help you out! Which way did you come in?
    ___ MultiMail/Linux v0.52

    --- Mystic BBS/QWK v1.12 A47 2021/12/25 (Windows/32)
    * Origin: cold fusion - cfbbs.net - grand rapids, mi (21:1/616)
  • From Dr. What@21:1/616 to Bob Worm on Wednesday, January 10, 2024 08:18:07
    Bob Worm wrote to Dr. What <=-

    Perhaps as an adult I should try to learn some good practices? My code
    is very utilitarian - gets the job of the day done but, man, nobody
    would want to work on it with me!

    I call that "Engineer code".

    My first real IT job was working on the FORTRAN IV code that processes data from a car crash test. All written by engineers (not computer scientists). It got the job done with the resources that they had (which at the time it was written was a 8K core RAM IBM mainframe), but it was not nice to change.


    ... I still miss my ex-wife - but my aim is improving!
    ___ MultiMail/Linux v0.52

    --- Mystic BBS/QWK v1.12 A47 2021/12/25 (Windows/32)
    * Origin: cold fusion - cfbbs.net - grand rapids, mi (21:1/616)
  • From Dr. What@21:1/616 to Nightfox on Wednesday, January 10, 2024 08:18:07
    Nightfox wrote to Dr. What <=-

    Colleges are often behind the times on techology. Mostly due to money.

    20+ years behind the times though?

    My Freshman year in college was the first year CS majors DIDN'T have to use punch cards. That would have been 1983. Some engineers still had to use them, though.

    And the computer we were on should have been decomissioned at least 5 years before. We had at least 5 different terminal types around the computer lab - each with their own quirks that you needed to learn.

    After the first year, they did start to decommission the Univac (finally!), and moved us to IBM-PCs with Turbo Pascal for our assignments. And by the time I graduated, the seniors had their own VAX in the CS building for their use. So things were a-changing by then.


    ... What are you looking down here for? Read the message.
    ___ MultiMail/Linux v0.52

    --- Mystic BBS/QWK v1.12 A47 2021/12/25 (Windows/32)
    * Origin: cold fusion - cfbbs.net - grand rapids, mi (21:1/616)
  • From Dr. What@21:1/616 to Blue White on Wednesday, January 10, 2024 08:18:07
    Blue White wrote to tenser <=-

    I worked in a shop that was trying to replace COBOL with Java. They
    found that, while Java did well at replacing "screen" programs, they
    ran into difficulties when it came to some of the complex mathematics
    and other heavy processing that happened during their nightly batch processing.

    Which is why those old languages are still out there. FORTRAN, for example, is still used and has been updated. I think we're up to FORTRAN 90 now.

    But other languages are trying to take over. Julia is a good example here. It's very much like Python, but it's also very fast with a focus on math. A good potential replacement for FORTRAN.

    At some point, these applications need to be rewritten. Oh, now I will have nightmares about the FORTRAN IV code that I worked on in 1984 that, even though I converted it to VS FORTRAN at that time, is still running and hasn't been rewritten into something more modern.

    On the same machine, an IBM mainframe, the dusty COBOL code
    outperformed what they were trying to replace it with.

    But that's not a big surprise.

    With Java, you compile to an interpreted byte code and run it in a JVM.

    With COBOL, it gets compiled to machine instructions that have been optimized up the wazoo over the last 40 years.

    COBOL has put food on my table for roughly 27 years now. I am glad I learned it.

    It did the same for me for about 10 years. But I don't admit to remembering how to code in it.


    ... We're lost but we're making good time.
    ___ MultiMail/Linux v0.52

    --- Mystic BBS/QWK v1.12 A47 2021/12/25 (Windows/32)
    * Origin: cold fusion - cfbbs.net - grand rapids, mi (21:1/616)
  • From tenser@21:1/101 to Nightfox on Thursday, January 11, 2024 02:46:06
    On 09 Jan 2024 at 05:22p, Nightfox pondered and said...

    Re: Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
    By: tenser to Blue White on Wed Jan 10 2024 01:27 pm

    My sense is that Java programmers favor a style that is heavy on frameworks, design patterns, and abstraction, often to the point of excess. This yields all sorts of efficiency problems, among other th

    I haven't done much with Java (aside from some Android work), but I've seen this with programmers in some other languages too. Sometimes
    people seem to like to make a bunch of different classes to handle different parts of the behavior, and abstract things into the various classes and to interfaces, etc., and that at least makes it more
    difficult to learn the codebase for someone new. Sometimes, such
    designs seem overly complicated.

    Yes. A lot of programmers seem to _really_ love complexity,
    and some I'm sad to say view their ability to handle complexity
    as a sign of superiority over those around them who, perhaps,
    can't keep quite as much in their heads at one time. It's not
    great.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)
  • From tenser@21:1/101 to Dr. What on Thursday, January 11, 2024 03:05:04
    On 10 Jan 2024 at 08:18a, Dr. What pondered and said...

    Which is why those old languages are still out there. FORTRAN, for example, is still used and has been updated. I think we're up to
    FORTRAN 90 now.

    Fortran 2018, actually. It only bears a passing resemblance
    to FORTRAN-77, let along -66 or IV (or earlier).

    There's an old joke. Q: "What language will scientists and
    engineers be programming in in 50 years?" A: "I don't know,
    but it will be called Fortran."

    But other languages are trying to take over. Julia is a good example here. It's very much like Python, but it's also very fast with a focus
    on math. A good potential replacement for FORTRAN.

    At some point, these applications need to be rewritten. Oh, now I will have nightmares about the FORTRAN IV code that I worked on in 1984 that, even though I converted it to VS FORTRAN at that time, is still running and hasn't been rewritten into something more modern.

    A friend of mine, now retired, is a former architect for
    high performance systems at Intel (did a PhD in transputers,
    worked on HPC-stuff his entire career). He likes to say,
    "Fortran pays my salary." He didn't personally program in
    it himself, but he had some very convincing arguments
    about _why_ Fortran was still used and would (and should)
    continue to be. Not only is modern Fortran actually a
    pretty reasonable language, it turns out that a lot of the
    design of the language lends itself to very aggressive
    optimizations; the aliasing rules, for instance, mean that
    the compiler can automatically parallalize lots of programs
    in a way that other languages (so far) haven't been able to
    match. Also, "the math hasn't changed."

    All that said, it'll be interesting to keep an eye on Julia
    and see where it goes. And this is to say nothing about
    Matlab, Mathematica, and other interactive environments that
    have Fortran-like languages and are popular in science
    and engineering.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)
  • From Dr. What@21:1/616 to tenser on Thursday, January 11, 2024 08:06:20
    tenser wrote to Dr. What <=-

    Fortran 2018, actually. It only bears a passing resemblance
    to FORTRAN-77, let along -66 or IV (or earlier).

    That's what I figured. When I was researching FORTRAN not too long ago, the YouTube tutorials in "newer" FORTRAN were very interesting.

    continue to be. Not only is modern Fortran actually a
    pretty reasonable language, it turns out that a lot of the
    design of the language lends itself to very aggressive
    optimizations; the aliasing rules, for instance, mean that
    the compiler can automatically parallalize lots of programs
    in a way that other languages (so far) haven't been able to
    match. Also, "the math hasn't changed."

    I've always felt that FORTRAN was a "medium level" programming language. That is, not at the assembly language level, but close enough to the hardware that it could be very fast.

    It's an awful tool for doing things like UIs, but is wonderful for just crunching numbers.

    Many needs means many programming languages. My grandpa always said: choose the right tool for the job and the job goes quickly and easily.


    ... How can you be so deaf with those huge ears?
    ___ MultiMail/Linux v0.52

    --- Mystic BBS/QWK v1.12 A47 2021/12/25 (Windows/32)
    * Origin: cold fusion - cfbbs.net - grand rapids, mi (21:1/616)
  • From tenser@21:1/101 to Dr. What on Friday, January 12, 2024 10:03:37
    On 11 Jan 2024 at 08:06a, Dr. What pondered and said...

    tenser wrote to Dr. What <=-

    Fortran 2018, actually. It only bears a passing resemblance
    to FORTRAN-77, let along -66 or IV (or earlier).

    That's what I figured. When I was researching FORTRAN not too long ago, the YouTube tutorials in "newer" FORTRAN were very interesting.

    Yup. Object oriented FORTRAN for the win!

    I've always felt that FORTRAN was a "medium level" programming language. That is, not at the assembly language level, but close enough to the hardware that it could be very fast.

    It's an awful tool for doing things like UIs, but is wonderful for just crunching numbers.

    I suppose that's not a bad characterization, but I would point
    out that often even higher-level things can be really aggressively
    optimized. There was a language about 20 years ago called "sisal"
    that was meant as a potential Fortran replacement; it was a
    functional language, but meant to be familiar to scientists and
    engineers and so on. It compiled down to Fortran. A few years
    later, someone did an APL implementation called "APEX" that
    compiled to sisal, that compiled to Fortran. The idea is that,
    in APL you have all of these very high-level operations, like,
    "compute matrix determinant" or "sum this vector". APL compilers, consequently, can do very high-level optimizations of APL programs;
    Sisal, in turn, could do a lot of medium-level optimizations of
    combining functions and things like that, while the system Fortran
    compiler could do all sorts of low-level optimizations like constant
    folding, instruction selection (using vector instructions? etc).
    So you'd get crazy optimized machine code at the end of this long
    pipeline, for very high-level conceptual code.

    ... The shortest distance between two points is under construction

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)
  • From MeaTLoTioN@21:1/158 to poindexter FORTRAN on Thursday, January 11, 2024 23:12:46
    On 04 Jan 2024, poindexter FORTRAN said the following...

    Anyone who studied CS in the 90s on probably started off with Pascal -
    not sure about nowadays.

    I certainly did, when I went to college Pascal was what I learned and loved it.

    ---
    |14Best regards,
    |11Ch|03rist|11ia|15n |11a|03ka |11Me|03aTLoT|11io|15N // @meatlotion:erb.pw

    |07── |08[|10eml|08] |15ml@erb.pw |07── |08[|10web|08] |15www.erb.pw |07───┐ |07── |08[|09fsx|08] |1521:1/158 |07── |08[|11tqw|08] |151337:1/101 |07┬──┘ |07── |08[|12rtn|08] |1580:774/81 |07─┬ |08[|14fdn|08] |152:250/5 |07───┘
    |07── |08[|10ark|08] |1510:104/2 |07─┘

    ... Documentation: The worst part of programming.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A49 2023/04/30 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: thE qUAntUm wOrmhOlE, rAmsgAtE, uK. bbs.erb.pw (21:1/158)
  • From poindexter FORTRAN@21:4/122 to Bob Worm on Friday, January 12, 2024 06:02:00
    Bob Worm wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

    Re: Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
    By: poindexter FORTRAN to Dr. What on Tue Jan 09 2024 06:31:00

    Later, I realized he had a consulting gig and was using us as junior
    talent and charging for our time. We got a A+ grades in the class.

    The question is, did figuring that out make you laugh or scowl?

    The A+ made it OK. :)



    ... Do they dream?
    --- MultiMail/Win v0.52
    * Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)
  • From poindexter FORTRAN@21:4/122 to tenser on Friday, January 12, 2024 06:06:00
    tenser wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

    I don't know, someone needs to run the AI, right? At least for the time being...

    I'm not sure what you mean by "run".... But yeah, right
    now humans are firmly in charge of the whole shebang.

    ChatGPT, for example, comes up with lots of content, but it needs
    tuning to make the tone and voice match what you want, and often it's
    downright wrong.

    Although eventually, either ChatGPT will get better or it'll learn to
    tune itself.


    ... Would you like to wake up from this dream?
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    * Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)
  • From poindexter FORTRAN@21:4/122 to Dr. What on Friday, January 12, 2024 06:08:00
    Dr. What wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

    Other profs, though, really had no idea what things were like.
    And none of my college classes prepared me for the office politics.

    Office Politics 101. Now, that would be a valuable class!



    --- MultiMail/Win v0.52
    * Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)
  • From poindexter FORTRAN@21:4/122 to Dr. What on Friday, January 12, 2024 06:25:00
    Dr. What wrote to Bob Worm <=-

    My first real IT job was working on the FORTRAN IV code that processes data from a car crash test. All written by engineers (not computer scientists). It got the job done with the resources that they had
    (which at the time it was written was a 8K core RAM IBM mainframe), but
    it was not nice to change.

    That reminds me of one of my first gigs, working on a PICK system, using
    BASIC, their batch language and a version of SQL. This was at a
    bookstore, and my predecessor apparently thought that obfuscated code
    equaled job security. He left, and I was hired and tasked with updating
    one of this little progs - this one looked up a SKU and gave you an
    inventory listing (how many, how many on the shelves, how many in the
    back, and how long they'd been there).

    His version was something like 450 lines. I started trying to update it,
    gave up and re-wrote the prog in something like 160 lines. That was a
    nice way to prove myself coming into a new gig.

    That was a great job, it was at my college bookstore, so I could drop in between classes. I got to work with a midrange computer with all of the dressings -- Enclosed server room with glass walls, raised floor, blinkenlights, line printers, 9-track tape backups, serial terminals.
    They'd moved from a completely paper-based iunventory system to this in
    under 12 months.




    ... All of my certifications are self-signed.
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    * Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)
  • From poindexter FORTRAN@21:4/122 to Dr. What on Friday, January 12, 2024 06:27:00
    Dr. What wrote to Nightfox <=-

    My Freshman year in college was the first year CS majors DIDN'T have to use punch cards. That would have been 1983. Some engineers still had
    to use them, though.

    I was in my senior year of high school in 1983. We were programming on
    Commodore CBM machines (PETs with custom ROMS for graphics and 32K of
    RAM instead of 8K).

    Our teacher brought in a computer system that ran on punched cards, and
    we had to enter a job on punched cards. We didn't understand why at the
    time, but he said "Trust me, you'll want to do this..."

    "SONNY, WHEN I STARTED OUT WE DIDN'T HAVE THOSE NEWFANGLED TERMINALS,
    WE USED PUNCHED CARDS TO ENTER OUR JOBS..." I get to say that now. :)




    ... All of my certifications are self-signed.
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    * Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)
  • From poindexter FORTRAN@21:4/122 to Dr. What on Friday, January 12, 2024 06:30:00
    Dr. What wrote to Blue White <=-

    Blue White wrote to tenser <=-

    Which is why those old languages are still out there. FORTRAN, for example, is still used and has been updated. I think we're up to
    FORTRAN 90 now.

    I remember when they "Numerical Recipes in FORTRAN" book became
    "Numerical Recipes in C". C seemed like the wrong language for the
    higher-level stuff that FORTRAN did well.




    ... All of my certifications are self-signed.
    --- MultiMail/Win v0.52
    * Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)
  • From poindexter FORTRAN@21:4/122 to tenser on Friday, January 12, 2024 06:34:00
    tenser wrote to Dr. What <=-

    There's an old joke. Q: "What language will scientists and
    engineers be programming in in 50 years?" A: "I don't know,
    but it will be called Fortran."

    Reminds me of the XKCD comic, "Team Chat". If it works, someone will
    still use it.

    https://xkcd.com/1782/

    2004:
    Our team stays in touch over IRC.

    2010:
    Our team mainly uses Skype, but some of us prefer to stick to IRC.

    2017:
    We've got almost everyone on Slack, but three people refuse to quit IRC
    and connect via gateway.

    2051:
    All consciousnesses have merged with the galactic singularity, except
    for one guy who insists on joining through his IRC client.

    "I have it set up the way I want, Okay?!"




    But other languages are trying to take over. Julia is a good example here. It's very much like Python, but it's also very fast with a focus
    on math. A good potential replacement for FORTRAN.

    At some point, these applications need to be rewritten. Oh, now I will have nightmares about the FORTRAN IV code that I worked on in 1984 that, even though I converted it to VS FORTRAN at that time, is still running and hasn't been rewritten into something more modern.

    A friend of mine, now retired, is a former architect for
    high performance systems at Intel (did a PhD in transputers,
    worked on HPC-stuff his entire career). He likes to say,
    "Fortran pays my salary." He didn't personally program in
    it himself, but he had some very convincing arguments
    about _why_ Fortran was still used and would (and should)
    continue to be. Not only is modern Fortran actually a
    pretty reasonable language, it turns out that a lot of the
    design of the language lends itself to very aggressive
    optimizations; the aliasing rules, for instance, mean that
    the compiler can automatically parallalize lots of programs
    in a way that other languages (so far) haven't been able to
    match. Also, "the math hasn't changed."

    All that said, it'll be interesting to keep an eye on Julia
    and see where it goes. And this is to say nothing about
    Matlab, Mathematica, and other interactive environments that
    have Fortran-like languages and are popular in science
    and engineering.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

    ... All of my certifications are self-signed.
    --- MultiMail/Win v0.52
    * Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)
  • From tenser@21:1/101 to poindexter FORTRAN on Saturday, January 13, 2024 13:15:50

    On 12 Jan 2024 at 06:30a, poindexter FORTRAN pondered and said...

    Dr. What wrote to Blue White <=-

    Blue White wrote to tenser <=-

    Which is why those old languages are still out there. FORTRAN, for example, is still used and has been updated. I think we're up to FORTRAN 90 now.

    I remember when they "Numerical Recipes in FORTRAN" book became
    "Numerical Recipes in C". C seemed like the wrong language for the
    higher-level stuff that FORTRAN did well.

    There were a few of those books! There was one in Pascal too,
    and one in C++. The FORTRAN one got updated to Fortran-90 at
    one pint (the original was in Fortran-77).

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)
  • From tenser@21:1/101 to poindexter FORTRAN on Saturday, January 13, 2024 13:17:17
    On 12 Jan 2024 at 06:34a, poindexter FORTRAN pondered and said...

    All consciousnesses have merged with the galactic singularity, except
    for one guy who insists on joining through his IRC client.

    "I have it set up the way I want, Okay?!"

    You laugh; we've got a guy who connects to our internal
    Matrix server via an IRC bridge.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)
  • From Dr. What@21:1/616 to poindexter FORTRAN on Saturday, January 13, 2024 10:43:27
    poindexter FORTRAN wrote to Dr. What <=-

    Other profs, though, really had no idea what things were like.
    And none of my college classes prepared me for the office politics.

    Office Politics 101. Now, that would be a valuable class!

    As vaulable as Data Structures, FORTRAN and C, that's for sure.


    ... Cross river *THEN* insult alligator.
    ___ MultiMail/Linux v0.52

    --- Mystic BBS/QWK v1.12 A47 2021/12/25 (Windows/32)
    * Origin: cold fusion - cfbbs.net - grand rapids, mi (21:1/616)
  • From Dr. What@21:1/616 to poindexter FORTRAN on Saturday, January 13, 2024 10:43:27
    poindexter FORTRAN wrote to Dr. What <=-

    "SONNY, WHEN I STARTED OUT WE DIDN'T HAVE THOSE NEWFANGLED TERMINALS,
    WE USED PUNCHED CARDS TO ENTER OUR JOBS..." I get to say that now.

    Sadly, I don't get to say that. But, really, I don't feel too bad about it and count myself lucky that I got to bypass those days.

    I do have some punch cards though, but they are used for bookmarks.


    ... New religion? I haven't used up the old one, yet!
    ___ MultiMail/Linux v0.52

    --- Mystic BBS/QWK v1.12 A47 2021/12/25 (Windows/32)
    * Origin: cold fusion - cfbbs.net - grand rapids, mi (21:1/616)
  • From Dr. What@21:1/616 to poindexter FORTRAN on Saturday, January 13, 2024 10:43:27
    poindexter FORTRAN wrote to Dr. What <=-

    I remember when they "Numerical Recipes in FORTRAN" book became
    "Numerical Recipes in C". C seemed like the wrong language for the
    higher-level stuff that FORTRAN did well.

    Ya, I remember the same when P.J.'s "Programming Pearls" got a revamp into "Programming Pearls for Pascal".

    But as languages evolved, and programmer needs changed, it was important that newbys learned good ways of doing things. Otherwise you end up with even more fodder for The Daily WTF.


    ... Honesty pays, but not enough for some.
    ___ MultiMail/Linux v0.52

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    * Origin: cold fusion - cfbbs.net - grand rapids, mi (21:1/616)
  • From tenser@21:1/101 to Dr. What on Sunday, January 14, 2024 08:44:53
    On 13 Jan 2024 at 10:43a, Dr. What pondered and said...

    poindexter FORTRAN wrote to Dr. What <=-

    I remember when they "Numerical Recipes in FORTRAN" book became
    "Numerical Recipes in C". C seemed like the wrong language for the
    higher-level stuff that FORTRAN did well.

    Ya, I remember the same when P.J.'s "Programming Pearls" got a revamp
    into "Programming Pearls for Pascal".

    "Programming Pearls" was written by Jon Bentley
    (who's father, incidentally, was a Marine at the
    Chosin Reservoir during the Korean War).

    You may be thinking of, "Software Tools", which was
    in ratfor ("Rational FORTRAN" --- a preprocessor that
    took a semi-structured language and emitted FORTRAN)
    and later translated into Pascal. That was by Brian
    Kernighan and PJ Plauger. Incidentally, that caused
    Kernighan to write is, "Why Pascal is Not My Favorite
    Programming Language" paper, which is worth a read: https://lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html

    But as languages evolved, and programmer needs changed, it was important that newbys learned good ways of doing things. Otherwise you end up
    with even more fodder for The Daily WTF.

    I think that's an invariant.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)
  • From Spectre@21:3/101 to poindexter FORTRAN on Sunday, January 14, 2024 05:40:00
    I was in my senior year of high school in 1983. We were programming on Commodore CBM machines (PETs with custom ROMS for graphics and 32K of
    RAM instead of 8K).

    In ~1985, the school I was about to leave, was still teaching programming on punch cards in some kinda antique mainframe. I forget what it was, and I
    can't find a record of what it was now... Junior students didn't get any interaction with it whatsoever though.

    That very same year, they put in a lab of C64's about 20 of them, with some fangled networking, attached to 2 x floppy drives. Always wondered how long that lasted for...

    Spec


    *** THE READER V4.50 [freeware]
    --- SuperBBS v1.17-3 (Eval)
    * Origin: Good Luck and drive offensively! (21:3/101)
  • From Joacim Melin@21:2/130 to tenser on Saturday, January 13, 2024 16:02:46
    On 07 Jan 2024 at 11:42a, Dr. What pondered and said...

    poindexter FORTRAN wrote to Nightfox <=-

    That makes sense, the PASCAL class was used mostly to teach data
    structures and algorithms, then everything else was in C, assembler
    o
    LISP. In retrospect I'd rather just jump into C or C++ instead of
    spending time learning another language.

    Pascal was intended to be a teaching language that taught you good
    programming practice. So that when you got to C/C++, and didn't have
    the seatbelts that Pascal gave you, you didn't kill yourself when your
    program crashed.

    It was always easy to pick out the kids who'd been
    exposed to COBOL and then learned C; their C code
    tended to be overly verbose and not terribly idiomatic.
    It'd take them a good while to come up to speed.

    The ones who came from BASIC had it the worst, though.

    The COBOL kids had shorter fingers, also known as COBOL fingers... ? :)




    --- NiKom v2.6.0
    * Origin: Delta City (deltacity.se, Vallentuna, Sweden) (21:2/130.0)
  • From Dr. What@21:1/616 to tenser on Sunday, January 14, 2024 11:13:01
    tenser wrote to Dr. What <=-

    "Programming Pearls" was written by Jon Bentley
    (who's father, incidentally, was a Marine at the
    Chosin Reservoir during the Korean War).

    You may be thinking of, "Software Tools", which was
    in ratfor ("Rational FORTRAN" --- a preprocessor that
    took a semi-structured language and emitted FORTRAN)
    and later translated into Pascal.

    You are correct. I got them mixed.

    I used to read "Programming Pearls" in the back issues of the Journal of the ACM back in college and had picked up the book. Sadly, I let it go a long time ago.

    I discovered "Software Tools" shortly after that (which is probably why I got them mixed) and read that one cover to cover. I think I even did some of the code in Pascal (before "Software Tools in Pascal" came out) as an exercise.

    That was by Brian
    Kernighan and PJ Plauger. Incidentally, that caused
    Kernighan to write is, "Why Pascal is Not My Favorite
    Programming Language" paper, which is worth a read: https://lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html

    I vaguely remember reading that a long time ago. PJ is right on his with his criticism of Pascal. But as he notes at the beginning "Comparing C and Pascal is rather like comparing a Learjet to a Piper Cub - one is meant for getting something done while the other is meant for learning - so such comparisons tend to be somewhat farfetched."

    My college profs were always clear: We are doing stuff in Pascal to teach you good habits. You won't use Pascal in the "real world", but the good habits you pick up doing everything in Pascal will serve you well. And they were (pretty much) right.


    ... BBS Tip #45: ALT-H gives you sysop access!
    ___ MultiMail/Linux v0.52

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    * Origin: cold fusion - cfbbs.net - grand rapids, mi (21:1/616)
  • From poindexter FORTRAN@21:4/122 to Dr. What on Saturday, January 13, 2024 10:38:00
    Dr. What wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

    Office Politics 101. Now, that would be a valuable class!

    As vaulable as Data Structures, FORTRAN and C, that's for sure.

    I worked with a group that took kids from community colleges and kids
    working out of high school and provided internships with corporate
    clients. I had four cohorts of kids working in my client services team
    that came from different walks of life and got a crash course in Word,
    Excel, collaboration tools and a corporate office primer.

    The kids ended up learning email skills, how to follow up, the
    importance of deliverables and meeting deadlines, how to dress and so
    on.

    Out of the 8 interns I had, some ended up getting jobs with the company
    they interned at, others were picked up by the managed service company
    we used, and others went on to tech and marketing gigs outside of the
    company.

    One person went from waiting tables to a $65K/year job in product
    management in 9 months.

    I learned almost as much as they learned - it was valuable as a
    50-something people manager to directly manage 20-somethings.




    ... alphabetise the alphabet (it's all wrong. will explain later)
    --- MultiMail/Win v0.52
    * Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)
  • From Arelor@21:2/138 to poindexter FORTRAN on Monday, January 15, 2024 03:48:11
    Re: Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
    By: poindexter FORTRAN to tenser on Tue Jan 09 2024 06:10 am

    My son is about to graduate with a marketing communications degree. I
    don't think AI is going to render him unemployable, I think the jobs are going to change. There won't be tons of human content creators, rather a handful of people who can effectively leverage AI to create content.


    I don't think language models are gonna crash marketing jobs, but marketing as a field is going to bubble quite hard. I have friends in marketing that are already recycling themselves because they foresee a burst.

    The problem with marketing is that it is getting very expensive and it is hard for customers to capitalize the marketing they buy. Only big big brands really get a benefit these days. Organic reach (aka growing a brand on the Internet) has been on the decline since 2015 or so, whereas meatspace marketing is just outright unaffordable. So many advertisers are just institutional orgs burning tax money with no planned return of investment.

    IMO it looks to me like some IT fields are also going to bubble. A lot of IT consists on creating expectations for a product and then waiting for investors to roll in, and build vaporware for years without actually delivering. I have seen the first medium-sized crash at a local level in a couple of years. It actually makes me worried for my friends in IT.
    --
    gopher://gopher.richardfalken.com/1/richardfalken
    --- SBBSecho 3.20-Linux
    * Origin: Palantir * palantirbbs.ddns.net * Pensacola, FL * (21:2/138)
  • From Dr. What@21:1/616 to poindexter FORTRAN on Monday, January 15, 2024 08:23:47
    poindexter FORTRAN wrote to Dr. What <=-

    The kids ended up learning email skills, how to follow up, the
    importance of deliverables and meeting deadlines, how to dress and so
    on.

    We definitely need more of this today. The once a year "Take your kid to work day" really doesn't cut it.

    My current company does intern programs in the summer and it is very successful. But it takes time and money (since someone has to manage, find work and mentor the interns) and there are more than few companies who are too cheap for that (like my previous employer).


    ... Rudolph changed his nose to 500 watts. Blew a fuse.
    ___ MultiMail/Linux v0.52

    --- Mystic BBS/QWK v1.12 A47 2021/12/25 (Windows/32)
    * Origin: cold fusion - cfbbs.net - grand rapids, mi (21:1/616)
  • From Blue White@21:4/134 to Arelor on Monday, January 15, 2024 08:27:02
    IMO it looks to me like some IT fields are also going to bubble. A lot
    of IT
    consists on creating expectations for a product and then waiting for investors
    to roll in, and build vaporware for years without actually delivering.
    I have
    seen the first medium-sized crash at a local level in a couple of
    years. It
    actually makes me worried for my friends in IT.

    That business model is at least part of what lead to the dot.com crash in
    the late 1990s.



    --- Talisman v0.51-dev (Linux/armv7l)
    * Origin: possumso.fsxnet.nz * telnet:2123/ssh:2122/ftelnet:80 (21:4/134)
  • From Gamgee@21:2/138 to Dr. What on Monday, January 15, 2024 08:01:00
    Dr. What wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

    poindexter FORTRAN wrote to Dr. What <=-

    The kids ended up learning email skills, how to follow up, the
    importance of deliverables and meeting deadlines, how to dress and so
    on.

    We definitely need more of this today. The once a year "Take
    your kid to work day" really doesn't cut it.

    My current company does intern programs in the summer and it is
    very successful. But it takes time and money (since someone has
    to manage, find work and mentor the interns) and there are more
    than few companies who are too cheap for that (like my previous
    employer).

    There are also significant safety/liability issues for the
    company/employer. Usually that alone is enough to make it not happen.



    ... Nothing is so smiple that it can't get screwed up.
    === MultiMail/Linux v0.52
    --- SBBSecho 3.20-Linux
    * Origin: Palantir * palantirbbs.ddns.net * Pensacola, FL * (21:2/138)
  • From tenser@21:1/101 to Joacim Melin on Tuesday, January 16, 2024 06:10:04
    On 13 Jan 2024 at 04:02p, Joacim Melin pondered and said...

    On 07 Jan 2024 at 11:42a, Dr. What pondered and said...

    poindexter FORTRAN wrote to Nightfox <=-

    That makes sense, the PASCAL class was used mostly to teach dat
    structures and algorithms, then everything else was in C, assem
    o
    LISP. In retrospect I'd rather just jump into C or C++ instead
    spending time learning another language.

    Pascal was intended to be a teaching language that taught you good
    programming practice. So that when you got to C/C++, and didn't hav
    the seatbelts that Pascal gave you, you didn't kill yourself when yo
    program crashed.

    It was always easy to pick out the kids who'd been
    exposed to COBOL and then learned C; their C code
    tended to be overly verbose and not terribly idiomatic.
    It'd take them a good while to come up to speed.

    The ones who came from BASIC had it the worst, though.

    The COBOL kids had shorter fingers, also known as COBOL fingers... ?
    :)

    Heh; that was actually a typo: I meant to say, "who had
    been exposed to Pascal and then learned C". My bad!

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)
  • From tenser@21:1/101 to Dr. What on Tuesday, January 16, 2024 06:15:10
    On 14 Jan 2024 at 11:13a, Dr. What pondered and said...

    tenser wrote to Dr. What <=-

    "Programming Pearls" was written by Jon Bentley
    (who's father, incidentally, was a Marine at the
    Chosin Reservoir during the Korean War).

    You may be thinking of, "Software Tools", which was
    in ratfor ("Rational FORTRAN" --- a preprocessor that
    took a semi-structured language and emitted FORTRAN)
    and later translated into Pascal.

    You are correct. I got them mixed.

    I used to read "Programming Pearls" in the back issues of the Journal of the ACM back in college and had picked up the book. Sadly, I let it go
    a long time ago.

    I think you meant Communications of the ACM; JACM is mostly
    theory. :-)

    I discovered "Software Tools" shortly after that (which is probably why
    I got them mixed) and read that one cover to cover. I think I even did some of the code in Pascal (before "Software Tools in Pascal" came out)
    as an exercise.

    That was by Brian
    Kernighan and PJ Plauger. Incidentally, that caused
    Kernighan to write is, "Why Pascal is Not My Favorite
    Programming Language" paper, which is worth a read: https://lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html

    I vaguely remember reading that a long time ago. PJ is right on his
    with his criticism of Pascal.

    Bwk, but yeah. One of the problems was that they were
    working in the context of standard Pascal, so they didn't
    have some of the nice-ities that say Turbo Pascal brought
    to the language (like a string type). It would have been
    interesting to see a version of Software Tools in e.g.
    Oberon.

    But as he notes at the beginning
    "Comparing C and Pascal is rather like comparing a Learjet to a Piper
    Cub - one is meant for getting something done while the other is meant
    for learning - so such comparisons tend to be somewhat farfetched."

    My college profs were always clear: We are doing stuff in Pascal to
    teach you good habits. You won't use Pascal in the "real world", but
    the good habits you pick up doing everything in Pascal will serve you well. And they were (pretty much) right.

    Agreed. Pascal was useful for teaching structured programming
    concepts, which for a lot of students was novel; either they
    had no prior experience programming at all or had learned BASIC
    (and quite possibly a bunch of bad habits) and needed a reset.
    But in the form it was usually taught, it wasn't a language I'd
    really want to have to write a lot of software in. The
    extended versions, maybe, but at that point aside from sharing
    syntax, it's not the same language.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)
  • From poindexter FORTRAN@21:4/122 to Blue White on Monday, January 15, 2024 09:22:00
    Blue White wrote to Arelor <=-

    That business model is at least part of what lead to the dot.com crash
    in the late 1990s.

    Those were heady times. I loved reading fuckedcompany.com and seeing
    companies with horrendously non-viable business ideas, like flake.com,
    a social network for people who like breakfast cereal.

    A company had their comeout party in San Francisco and closed
    operations the next day.

    I worked for a company that offered free MP3 downloads of indie music -
    they'd negotiated rights with indie labels like SubPop. I recall being
    in meetings with Yahoo to negotiate a deal, and no one was sure who
    should be paying whom - were we paying them for exposure, or were they
    paying us for content?

    Strange times, indeed.



    ... When in doubt, predict that the trend will continue.
    --- MultiMail/Win v0.52
    * Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)
  • From tenser@21:1/101 to poindexter FORTRAN on Tuesday, January 16, 2024 14:08:53
    On 15 Jan 2024 at 09:22a, poindexter FORTRAN pondered and said...

    Blue White wrote to Arelor <=-

    That business model is at least part of what lead to the dot.com cras in the late 1990s.

    Those were heady times. I loved reading fuckedcompany.com and seeing
    companies with horrendously non-viable business ideas, like flake.com,
    a social network for people who like breakfast cereal.

    A company had their comeout party in San Francisco and closed
    operations the next day.

    I remember something like that. There was a company that
    built an actual physical wireless device that interacted with
    little sensors all over New York City. They launched and
    then went under the next day. All these people who'd bought
    these dumb little devices were just out the hundred bucks or
    whatever they'd spent for the things.

    We cracked one open at the company I worked at at the time
    and looked inside. I remember it had a Dragonball Z processor
    (Motorola 68000 core, basically) but that's about it.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)
  • From Digital Man to tenser on Monday, January 15, 2024 18:18:06
    Re: Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
    By: tenser to poindexter FORTRAN on Mon Jan 08 2024 03:51 am

    That makes sense, the PASCAL class was used mostly to teach data structures and algorithms, then everything else was in C, assembler or LISP. In retrospect I'd rather just jump into C or C++ instead of spending time learning another language.

    Honestly, at this point, I can't think of a good reason
    to teach C at the collegiate level.

    C++ (not C) appears to be the collegiate programming language of choice these days. It was Java for a while, C before that, Pascal before that, and FORTRAN before that.
    --
    digital man (rob)

    Breaking Bad quote #47:
    He said he'll break my legs, he meant It... he gave me the dead mackerel eyes. Norco, CA WX: 56.4°F, 74.0% humidity, 2 mph NW wind, 0.00 inches rain/24hrs
  • From Dr. What@21:1/616 to tenser on Tuesday, January 16, 2024 07:24:20
    tenser wrote to Dr. What <=-

    I used to read "Programming Pearls" in the back issues of the Journal of the ACM back in college and had picked up the book. Sadly, I let it go
    a long time ago.

    I think you meant Communications of the ACM; JACM is mostly
    theory. :-)

    I'm not sure. By the time I actually joined the ACM, I got Communications. But I'm pretty sure that the back issues I read were called "Journals of the ACM". But I'm uncertain which had "Programming Pearls", but I think it was Communications.

    One of the things that surprises me as I get into vintage computers is how much I mis-remember.

    Bwk, but yeah. One of the problems was that they were
    working in the context of standard Pascal, so they didn't
    have some of the nice-ities that say Turbo Pascal brought
    to the language (like a string type). It would have been
    interesting to see a version of Software Tools in e.g.
    Oberon.

    Ya, the Software Tools was mainly about writing unix-c-like stuff in various languages. But C was becoming the dominate tool by then and Software Tools in OtherLanguage wasn't that much in demand.


    ... Things working well, no problems. Time to upgrade.
    ___ MultiMail/Linux v0.52

    --- Mystic BBS/QWK v1.12 A47 2021/12/25 (Windows/32)
    * Origin: cold fusion - cfbbs.net - grand rapids, mi (21:1/616)
  • From tenser@21:1/101 to Digital Man on Wednesday, January 17, 2024 04:22:18
    On 15 Jan 2024 at 06:18p, Digital Man pondered and said...

    Re: Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
    By: tenser to poindexter FORTRAN on Mon Jan 08 2024 03:51 am

    That makes sense, the PASCAL class was used mostly to teach data structures and algorithms, then everything else was in C, assemble LISP. In retrospect I'd rather just jump into C or C++ instead of spending time learning another language.

    Honestly, at this point, I can't think of a good reason
    to teach C at the collegiate level.

    C++ (not C) appears to be the collegiate programming language of choice these days.

    Really? God help us.

    It was Java for a while, C before that, Pascal before that,
    and FORTRAN before that.

    Yeah. My sense observing those classes was that
    Pascal was used in the lower year classes, then C
    for things like compilers, OS, etc. At one point
    I saw a COBOL class offered. *shudder*

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)
  • From tenser@21:1/101 to Dr. What on Wednesday, January 17, 2024 04:32:07
    On 16 Jan 2024 at 07:24a, Dr. What pondered and said...

    tenser wrote to Dr. What <=-

    I used to read "Programming Pearls" in the back issues of the Journal the ACM back in college and had picked up the book. Sadly, I let it a long time ago.

    I think you meant Communications of the ACM; JACM is mostly
    theory. :-)

    I'm not sure. By the time I actually joined the ACM, I got Communications. But I'm pretty sure that the back issues I read were called "Journals of the ACM". But I'm uncertain which had "Programming Pearls", but I think it was Communications.

    Communications was considered a journal at one point,
    and contained a lot of articles that would be considered
    "journal articles" these days, but was never "Journal of
    the ACM" which is a separate publication. It's kind of
    weird, but in systems, most of the focus is on conference
    publications, not publishing in journals (unlike most of
    the rest of the research community). So Communications
    used to have a lot of papers that were kind of systems-y,
    but much less these days. Communications nowadays is
    more like a magazine.

    One of the things that surprises me as I get into vintage computers is
    how much I mis-remember.

    And how! I hear you on that.

    Bwk, but yeah. One of the problems was that they were
    working in the context of standard Pascal, so they didn't
    have some of the nice-ities that say Turbo Pascal brought
    to the language (like a string type). It would have been
    interesting to see a version of Software Tools in e.g.
    Oberon.

    Ya, the Software Tools was mainly about writing unix-c-like stuff in various languages. But C was becoming the dominate tool by then and Software Tools in OtherLanguage wasn't that much in demand.

    Software tools took on a life of its own outside of the
    books, and was a thriving project for quite a while,
    particularly in the minicomputer era. E.g., it was quite
    popular on Pr1me computers.

    These days, of course, there's a C compiler for everything;
    back then there was a Fortran compiler for everything, and
    then a Pascal compiler for everything since that was the
    language of teaching for so long. Oberon was the last of
    Wirth's languages, and in many respects, it was closer to
    C than to Pascal; as such, it remedied many of the short
    comings that Kernighan noted in his polemic about Pascal
    (for example, in Oberon, the size of an array is not part
    of its type, like in C). Had there been an Oberon version
    of the book, it may have been a more natural presentation,
    like a C version, for many of the utilities. Of course,
    Oberon didn't exist at th time.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)
  • From NuSkooler@21:1/121 to tenser on Tuesday, January 16, 2024 09:38:12

    On Thursday, January 18th tenser said...
    C++ (not C) appears to be the collegiate programming language of

    Every time I see students come out of these courses, or the courses themselves, it's really "C with a C++ compiler and we used a stream".

    boggles the mind. Hoping people move to Rust. C++ is a disaster, and I can safely say that as someone extremely proficient in the language (up to C++20)


    --
    |08 ■ |12NuSkooler |06// |12Xibalba |08- |07"|06The place of fear|07"
    |08 ■ |03xibalba|08.|03vip |08(|0344510|08/|03telnet|08, |0344511|08/|03ssh|08)
    |08 ■ |03ENiGMA 1/2 WHQ |08| |03Phenom |08| |0367 |08| |03iMPURE |08| |03ACiDic
    --- ENiGMA 1/2 v0.0.14-beta (linux; x64; 18.18.2)
    * Origin: Xibalba -+- xibalba.l33t.codes:44510 (21:1/121)
  • From fusion@21:1/616 to Digital Man on Tuesday, January 16, 2024 12:47:17
    On 15 Jan 2024, Digital Man said the following...

    C++ (not C) appears to be the collegiate programming language of choice these days. It was Java for a while, C before that, Pascal before that, and FORTRAN before that.

    back in 2000 i had BASIC and C++ classes. i think BASIC was there to catch people who had to learn what programming even was. then you have C++ to teach them to enjoy pain.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/25 (Windows/32)
    * Origin: cold fusion - cfbbs.net - grand rapids, mi (21:1/616)
  • From fusion@21:1/616 to NuSkooler on Tuesday, January 16, 2024 12:51:36
    On 16 Jan 2024, NuSkooler said the following...

    boggles the mind. Hoping people move to Rust. C++ is a disaster, and I
    can safely say that as someone extremely proficient in the language (up
    to C++20)

    rust isn't the answer. it just allows you to write crap code that doesn't crash. some might think that's a good thing, but it's just another in a long line of bloated junk.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/25 (Windows/32)
    * Origin: cold fusion - cfbbs.net - grand rapids, mi (21:1/616)
  • From Nightfox@21:1/137 to NuSkooler on Tuesday, January 16, 2024 09:58:31
    Re: Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
    By: NuSkooler to tenser on Tue Jan 16 2024 09:38 am

    C++ (not C) appears to be the collegiate programming language of

    Every time I see students come out of these courses, or the courses themselves, it's really "C with a C++ compiler and we used a stream".

    They must have a poor curriculum then.. When I was in my software engineering program 20+ years ago, we learned C++ but they taught object-oriented programming from the beginning, and taught about classes, streaming I/O, STL, etc..

    boggles the mind. Hoping people move to Rust. C++ is a disaster, and I can safely say that as someone extremely proficient in the language (up to C++20)

    I haven't used Rust yet, but I've also used C++ quite a bit. Maybe I had gotten used to C++, but I don't really mind it a whole lot. That said, I've used C# in some projects recently and some things did feel easier to do.

    Nightfox
    --- SBBSecho 3.20-Linux
    * Origin: Digital Distortion: digdist.synchro.net (21:1/137)
  • From NuSkooler@21:1/121 to fusion on Tuesday, January 16, 2024 13:41:02

    Twas Tuesday, January 16th when fusion said...
    rust isn't the answer. it just allows you to write crap code that doesn't crash. some might think that's a good thing, but it's just another in a long line of bloated junk.

    Thats certainly the first I've heard such claims. Rust forces you to work with memory safely, forces you to syncronize safely, etc., and compiles down to machine code compariable with C++. I'm really not sure where you get those thoughts.

    --
    |08 ■ |12NuSkooler |06// |12Xibalba |08- |07"|06The place of fear|07"
    |08 ■ |03xibalba|08.|03vip |08(|0344510|08/|03telnet|08, |0344511|08/|03ssh|08)
    |08 ■ |03ENiGMA 1/2 WHQ |08| |03Phenom |08| |0367 |08| |03iMPURE |08| |03ACiDic
    --- ENiGMA 1/2 v0.0.14-beta (linux; x64; 18.18.2)
    * Origin: Xibalba -+- xibalba.l33t.codes:44510 (21:1/121)
  • From Digital Man to poindexter FORTRAN on Tuesday, January 16, 2024 15:50:45
    Re: Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
    By: poindexter FORTRAN to hollowone on Mon Jan 08 2024 06:30 am

    I live near Santa Cruz, and drive by the old Borland building
    occasionally, Seagate's old office (the address was 1 disk drive...) and where I took a UNIX training class at SCO.

    I know that area and buildings well.

    My brother lived in Aptos until just recently (moved down south closer to me) and worked for a long long time at Borland, Inprise, CodeGear, Embarcadero Tech (product manager for Delphi, C++Builder, etc.).
    --
    digital man (rob)

    Rush quote #40:
    I can learn to resist, anything but temptation
    Norco, CA WX: 69.0°F, 45.0% humidity, 6 mph W wind, 0.00 inches rain/24hrs
  • From Dr. What@21:1/616 to tenser on Wednesday, January 17, 2024 07:44:35
    tenser wrote to Dr. What <=-

    the rest of the research community). So Communications
    used to have a lot of papers that were kind of systems-y,
    but much less these days. Communications nowadays is
    more like a magazine.

    Ya, I let my membership lapse because they were moving away from computer technology and getting into more social-issues-and-stuff.

    Software tools took on a life of its own outside of the
    books, and was a thriving project for quite a while,
    particularly in the minicomputer era. E.g., it was quite
    popular on Pr1me computers.

    For me, what was interesting about Software Tools was that it was general, but still kind of basic. So if you wanted to learn a new language, or computer system, it was a accomplishable challenge to port the Software Tools ideas to that language/system.

    In the mix, you got experience in that language/system and a box of useful tools. But I think that was the point of Software Tools.

    These days, of course, there's a C compiler for everything;
    back then there was a Fortran compiler for everything, and
    then a Pascal compiler for everything since that was the
    language of teaching for so long.

    But even back then there was a C compiler for everything with a disk drive. I have a C compiler for all my vintage systems ranging from TRS-80 Model 4P, to CP/M and MS-DOS.

    Now, they weren't necessairly really good C compliers and had some serious limitations, but they were there and useable.

    Oberon was the last of
    Wirth's languages, and in many respects, it was closer to
    C than to Pascal; as such, it remedied many of the short
    comings that Kernighan noted in his polemic about Pascal
    (for example, in Oberon, the size of an array is not part
    of its type, like in C). Had there been an Oberon version
    of the book, it may have been a more natural presentation,
    like a C version, for many of the utilities. Of course,
    Oberon didn't exist at th time.

    Ya, but we have to take the market into account as well and what developers wanted.

    Pascal served us well as a teaching tool, but the market demand was for C and I got that in college.

    Oberon sounds nice, but if everyone wants to learn C, no one pays attention to the other options.


    ... Hot water Heaters: hot water needs heating?
    ___ MultiMail/Linux v0.52

    --- Mystic BBS/QWK v1.12 A47 2021/12/25 (Windows/32)
    * Origin: cold fusion - cfbbs.net - grand rapids, mi (21:1/616)
  • From Dr. What@21:1/616 to tenser on Wednesday, January 17, 2024 07:44:35
    tenser wrote to Digital Man <=-

    Yeah. My sense observing those classes was that
    Pascal was used in the lower year classes, then C
    for things like compilers, OS, etc. At one point
    I saw a COBOL class offered. *shudder*

    That's pretty much how things were when I went to college.

    Add in LISP for the AI classes.

    COBOL was only a business college class, though, not Computer Science.


    ... Every silver lining has a cloud around it.
    ___ MultiMail/Linux v0.52

    --- Mystic BBS/QWK v1.12 A47 2021/12/25 (Windows/32)
    * Origin: cold fusion - cfbbs.net - grand rapids, mi (21:1/616)
  • From tenser@21:1/101 to fusion on Thursday, January 18, 2024 05:35:53
    On 16 Jan 2024 at 12:51p, fusion pondered and said...

    rust isn't the answer. it just allows you to write crap code that doesn't crash. some might think that's a good thing, but it's just another in a long line of bloated junk.

    I've heard claims like this before, but I haven't experienced
    it myself. I came to Rust very skeptical, but figured if it
    could deliver on even a quarter of its claims I'd be way ahead
    of C; it's pleasantly surprised me, and I've been using it
    professionally for about 5 years now. One _can_ write poor
    Rust code, of course, but generally I've found much of it to
    be quite good.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)
  • From Nightfox@21:1/137 to tenser on Wednesday, January 17, 2024 09:18:00
    Re: Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
    By: tenser to fusion on Thu Jan 18 2024 05:35 am

    I've heard claims like this before, but I haven't experienced it myself.
    I came to Rust very skeptical, but figured if it could deliver on even a quarter of its claims I'd be way ahead of C; it's pleasantly surprised me, and I've been using it professionally for about 5 years now. One _can_

    What are you using it for? I've heard people like Rust, but none of the companies I've worked at have used Rust at all.

    Nightfox
    --- SBBSecho 3.20-Linux
    * Origin: Digital Distortion: digdist.synchro.net (21:1/137)
  • From tenser@21:1/101 to Nightfox on Thursday, January 18, 2024 14:44:28
    On 17 Jan 2024 at 09:18a, Nightfox pondered and said...

    I've heard claims like this before, but I haven't experienced it myse I came to Rust very skeptical, but figured if it could deliver on eve quarter of its claims I'd be way ahead of C; it's pleasantly surprise and I've been using it professionally for about 5 years now. One _ca

    What are you using it for? I've heard people like Rust, but none of the companies I've worked at have used Rust at all.

    Me personally, mostly kernel level code. I've written one
    small kernel, one complete operating system (well, the kernel
    and C library are in Rust; most of the userspace programs are
    in C), two virtual machine monitors (that is, the component of
    a hypervisor that drives the virtualization hardware and OS
    components; not the userspace part like QEMU or proxmox. Both
    of these were type-1 hypervisors, so think something equivalent
    to Xen), and the boot loader that runs from the reset vector
    on the machines we build and sell for work. I've done a
    smattering of userspace programs and libraries, too, but it's
    been mostly bare metal on big multicore x86 machines. Oh! I
    wrote the firmware for an optical mouse I designed and built
    that's a clone of the old Depraz mouse. That uses embassy on
    an STM32 microcontroller (ARM Cortex-M).

    I remember when we were writing the first hypervisor and I
    wrote the code to parse ACPI tables and find all the processors;
    the code walked the ACPI tables after it found them in physical
    memory and built little data structures representing them;
    this is really early bringup code and I didn't have a memory
    allocator yet, so I stored the parsed representation of the
    tables in a static array; I think it had 10 elements. When I
    first ran it, it was under QEMU and that only had like 3 or 4
    tables. But the first time I ran it on real hardware, all of
    a sudden there were a dozen or so: more than I had space for.
    But, it was a debug build, so all array accesses are bounds
    checked; I got a well-formed panic and the machine stopped in
    a halt loop. Had it been C, I'd probably just have walked off
    the end of the array and trashed memory that early. It struck
    me that this was REALLY powerful, and the hair on my arm actually
    stood up on end.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)
  • From hollowone@21:2/150 to tenser on Friday, January 19, 2024 07:08:18

    Yes. A lot of programmers seem to _really_ love complexity,
    and some I'm sad to say view their ability to handle complexity
    as a sign of superiority over those around them who, perhaps,
    can't keep quite as much in their heads at one time. It's not
    great.


    If one observes these things long enough then figures that something once simple becomes complex and then unnecessary complex, meaning bloated.

    Then the level of over-bloatness is so big that next gen of developers tweaks with syntax to achieve exactly the same thing just simpler and on the next gen platforms (HW/OS). Then previous generation sometimes discovers it and if they are progressive they simplify back what was discovered as new, adapting to new world... then all generations contribute to the continual bloating process.. and that's how we have cycles defined...

    Syntax, operativeness, tool sets, paradigms... all are applied to these and are subjects of decades long fashions...

    At the end the only thing that matters is the ability to simplify.. thanks to that APIs in the good old C frameworks I keep discovering today... are so much better than those from 20 years ago.. just because people learnt all that across different tools, platforms, languages and paradigms... and turned it back to a simple statement.

    -h1

    ... Xerox Alto was the thing. Anything after we use is just a mere copy.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: 2o fOr beeRS bbs>>>20ForBeers.com:1337 (21:2/150)
  • From hollowone@21:2/150 to poindexter FORTRAN on Sunday, January 21, 2024 06:55:07
    I remember when they "Numerical Recipes in FORTRAN" book became
    "Numerical Recipes in C". C seemed like the wrong language for the
    higher-level stuff that FORTRAN did well.

    I remember that book for C. I liked it. Can't compare to Fortran, but it was enlightening me a lot in my early C days. That one and The one explaining fundamental data structures.

    -h1

    ... Xerox Alto was the thing. Anything after we use is just a mere copy.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: 2o fOr beeRS bbs>>>20ForBeers.com:1337 (21:2/150)
  • From Adept@21:2/108 to Dr. What on Wednesday, February 07, 2024 16:29:45
    Office Politics 101. Now, that would be a valuable class!

    As vaulable as Data Structures, FORTRAN and C, that's for sure.

    Teaching social skills to a nerdy crowd is probably hard work, too, so good teachers there would be _invaluable_.

    But the comment on Data Structures reminds me how I had a hard time with the class the first time, and dropped out of CS soon after, mostly feeling as though it wasn't my people, for whatever reason. But also just being awful at the math classes (not because I couldn't understand it; because I've never been good at _studying_.)

    But the second time through? It was fun! Just kinda neat to see how the various things fit together.

    Kind of like how I enjoy explaining a matrix sort, because it's something I use in daily life, but people don't understand. _Especially_ when getting away from base 10.

    But the concept is really cool, as you can take a stack of stickers for a sticker album, and sort them touching each sticker exactly three times.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: Storm BBS (21:2/108)
  • From Dr. What@21:1/616 to Adept on Thursday, February 08, 2024 07:26:46
    Adept wrote to Dr. What <=-

    Teaching social skills to a nerdy crowd is probably hard work, too, so good teachers there would be _invaluable_.

    Yup. Plus having teachers who have spent some time in the corporate world would have been very helpful. I don't think I've ever had a teacher that hadn't spent his whole career in academia.

    But the second time through? It was fun! Just kinda neat to see how the various things fit together.

    It takes time to build up that base of knowledge that you need to "get" the rest of it.

    My dad taught 8th grade science, so I was exposed to that at a very early age. That laid the base for me when he bought home a TRS-80 Model I for the summer.


    ... Today is a good day to bribe a high--ranking official.
    ___ MultiMail/Linux v0.52

    --- Mystic BBS/QWK v1.12 A47 2021/12/25 (Windows/32)
    * Origin: cold fusion - cfbbs.net - grand rapids, mi (21:1/616)
  • From Adept@21:2/108 to Dr. What on Thursday, February 08, 2024 14:12:13
    Yup. Plus having teachers who have spent some time in the corporate
    world would have been very helpful. I don't think I've ever had a
    teacher that hadn't spent his whole career in academia.

    That _does_ make sense, though that sort of thing is so hard -- teaching _is_ a skill, so it kind of becomes like training an astronaut to drill, or teaching drillers to be an astronaut.

    (Bad example, awful movie (because of the science), but I think it conveys the idea)

    But you either wind up with someone who never learned to teach, or someone who never had corporate experience. Or someone who spent a few years changing careers when they could've just continued working in the field.

    My dad taught 8th grade science, so I was exposed to that at a very
    early age. That laid the base for me when he bought home a TRS-80 Model
    I for the summer.

    That makes sense. My dad got a computer early on (I vaguely remember the purchase, and looking _up_ at the store counter), and I think having to understand how a computer works helped with gaining various repair logic skills. And with those skills I started doing tech support at least by 5th grade when I got called out of a class to fix a computer.

    And, while I pride myself in being able to explain technical things to less-technically-inclined people, I've never had the slightest clue on how to get people to _think_ in that sort of fashion, even for people who do well with logic outside of the computer realm.

    I imagine that early exposure helps, though, in my case, it might have been due to exposure to so many other things, including being around autistic people.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: Storm BBS (21:2/108)
  • From Dr. What@21:1/616 to Adept on Friday, February 09, 2024 07:47:04
    Adept wrote to Dr. What <=-

    That _does_ make sense, though that sort of thing is so hard --
    teaching _is_ a skill, so it kind of becomes like training an astronaut
    to drill, or teaching drillers to be an astronaut.

    It certainly does take a special kind of person to be a good teacher.

    I've known colleges that recruit teachers from the corporate world. They teach for a few years, then rotate back into the corporate world. They may not be the best teachers, but they do have more knowledge than a teacher who has never had a "real job".

    The problem that I saw when in college then in corporate is that the culture in academia is very different than corporate and they really don't prepare you for that. And for geeky people, that prepartion would have been very useful.

    repair logic skills. And with those skills I started doing tech support
    at least by 5th grade when I got called out of a class to fix a
    computer.

    When I was in high school, there was such a huge demand for learning computers that the continuing education recruited us to teach the elementary school kids.

    They were bored until I told them that they could program the computer to do their math homework. They had so much fun that they didn't realize that they worked harder to write that program than the would have done just doing the homework.

    And, while I pride myself in being able to explain technical things to less-technically-inclined people, I've never had the slightest clue on
    how to get people to _think_ in that sort of fashion, even for people
    who do well with logic outside of the computer realm.

    And I found that you can't get people to think in certain ways. The best you can do is explain things in many different ways, hoping that one will stick.

    Some people just aren't going to "get it".


    ... Take my advice, I don't use it anyway.
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    * Origin: cold fusion - cfbbs.net - grand rapids, mi (21:1/616)
  • From Adept@21:2/108 to Dr. What on Friday, February 09, 2024 16:42:22
    They may not be the best teachers, but they do have more knowledge than
    a teacher who has never had a "real job".

    It does seem like something that might be ideal as guest lecturers of some sort.

    But always kind of hard to say what would be best, at least without lots of well-designed studies.

    And who knows how one _tests_ for such things.

    don't prepare you for that. And for geeky people, that prepartion would have been very useful.

    True, though I'm not sure how much I understood the _academic_ world. But I'm probably not the best example, as I've never had too much of a problem with being able to understand people, or how to communicate in different situations.

    Sure, plenty of other issues, but my geekiness in growing up was that I spent a lot of time on BBSing message boards, while my brother spent a lot of time in the file section or the various other things that didn't involve random people as much.

    They were bored until I told them that they could program the computer
    to do their math homework. They had so much fun that they didn't
    realize that they worked harder to write that program than the would
    have done just doing the homework.

    Neat! I do remember, in my Physics class, where we could put stuff onto the calculator as notes for whatever we were doing.

    So I wrote a program for a particular set of problems, which, of course, meant that I knew the formula _really_ well, rather than it being remotely useful as a cheat sheet.

    Did keep me from making calculation mistakes on the test, though, I'm sure.

    And, on the teaching side of things, I was a guest in a high school Computer Science class where the students spent a couple of weeks making a theme for library self checkouts, where I gave them instructions on how, but they made all the files and whatnot, that I eventually put on the self checkouts.

    I think it was well-received. Or at least they liked it enough that they made some neat things.

    And I found that you can't get people to think in certain ways. The
    best you can do is explain things in many different ways, hoping that
    one will stick.

    Yeah. Best to meet people where they are, and hopefully add to their tree of knowledge given the branches that they already have.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: Storm BBS (21:2/108)
  • From Dr. What@21:1/616 to Adept on Saturday, February 10, 2024 08:33:51
    Adept wrote to Dr. What <=-

    It does seem like something that might be ideal as guest lecturers of
    some sort.

    Now that's a good idea.

    But always kind of hard to say what would be best, at least without
    lots of well-designed studies.

    And who knows how one _tests_ for such things.

    But I don't think we need to test for that. Let me give an example.

    In college, one of my classes we had to write a text editor. On Monday, the prof gave us the specs. Every other class or so, he would change the specs - just a bit - or add another small requirement (scope creep). At the end, he told us why he did it that way - to simulate what you will have to deal with on the job.

    And he was pretty much right. But such stuff wasn't on the test. But that wasn't important. What was important was to make us understand that we will almost never get 100% complete/correct specs at the start of the project and things will change "in flight."

    But that was the only class that did something like that.

    Neat! I do remember, in my Physics class, where we could put stuff onto the calculator as notes for whatever we were doing.

    In college, I programmed up my TRS-80 PC-4 to do the Newton/Raphson root finding method. We actually covered it in class, which inspired me to write the program. On a test, the prof watched me use it. He asked me a few quiet questions about it and said "Neat!" and walked away. I think he was impressed that I actually applied something he taught.

    So I wrote a program for a particular set of problems, which, of
    course, meant that I knew the formula _really_ well, rather than it
    being remotely useful as a cheat sheet.

    I did the same thing for Chemistry class in high school. My classmates said "The teacher won't accept the printout". But he did - along with the source code for the BASIC program I wrote. He then said I didn't have to do the homework for this anymore because if I could teach a computer how to do it, I must have mastered the concept.


    ... Sigmund's wife wore Freudian slips.
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    * Origin: cold fusion - cfbbs.net - grand rapids, mi (21:1/616)
  • From tenser@21:1/101 to Adept on Sunday, February 11, 2024 13:08:13
    On 09 Feb 2024 at 04:42p, Adept pondered and said...

    They may not be the best teachers, but they do have more knowledge th a teacher who has never had a "real job".

    It does seem like something that might be ideal as guest lecturers of
    some sort.

    Such a thing exists; at least at the collegiate level.
    That's precisely what adjunct professors are supposed
    to be: people with relevant domain experience who assist
    with _teaching_ at the college level. Often these
    people have lots of industry experience and quite
    possibly advanced degrees in the field. I've taught a
    few classes that way (at MIT and NYU; both CS).

    Sadly, the adjunct system is now being abused to provide
    low-wage teaching labor in universities where tenure track
    faculty don't want to do it, or where there just aren't
    enough full-time faculty to meet the teaching demand, and
    the administration doesn't want to great new positions.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)
  • From Adept@21:2/108 to Dr. What on Monday, February 12, 2024 21:47:46
    the prof gave us the specs. Every other class or so, he would change
    the specs - just a bit - or add another small requirement (scope creep). At the end, he told us why he did it that way - to simulate what you
    will have to deal with on the job.

    Yeah, that does seem like an excellent way to expose you to something that's more real-world like.

    Though, in school, I remember switching IDE, language, code repository, and probably lots of other things with each different set of classes, so by the time things became requirement creep it just seemed like, "okay, someone else has another set of requirements for us to deal with".

    But, yeah, not _quite_ the same, since theoretically the professor gave enough information at the beginning to know the final outcome.

    I did the same thing for Chemistry class in high school. My classmates said "The teacher won't accept the printout". But he did - along with
    the source code for the BASIC program I wrote. He then said I didn't
    have to do the homework for this anymore because if I could teach a computer how to do it, I must have mastered the concept.

    Nifty! This reminds me of the Philosophy of Logic class that I took (and really enjoyed) where, as a final project sort of thing, the professor gave us a group project where we'd have to solve a 12-variable (or something like that) logic thing, determining which variables were true or false.

    And he said something along the lines of it being much too complicated to brute force the answer.

    But it was not remotely complicated for a computer, so my groupmate wrote a program that tried all possibilities, printed out all the possibilities, and highlighted the correct solution.

    And then I took that knowledge, assumed the known-false conclusion and worked until I got a contradiction, and worked my way through the variables without worrying about going down any wrong paths.

    We handed in the printout along with the logic, but it just got a question mark or something on it, so I think we just confused the professor. But someone used to humans doing logic things is going to have a different idea of what's possible to brute force than someone who thinks it through with a computer.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
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  • From Dr. What@21:1/616 to Adept on Tuesday, February 13, 2024 07:46:16
    Adept wrote to Dr. What <=-

    Though, in school, I remember switching IDE, language, code repository, and probably lots of other things with each different set of classes,
    so by the time things became requirement creep it just seemed like,
    "okay, someone else has another set of requirements for us to deal
    with".

    But, yeah, not _quite_ the same, since theoretically the professor gave enough information at the beginning to know the final outcome.

    Closer to the real world than you might think. Especially if the tech lead of the project suffers from neophilia.

    I remember knowing some people who worked for K-Mart (IT dept) and one of their big problems was that they'd get a manager who decided to go "this way" with tech. They'd buy hardware, software, start to get trained, etc. Then that manager would move on and they'd get another mananger who would say "This way is wrong. We need to go that way." and the whole cycle of hardware, software, training would start over again.

    It's no wonder why their IT dept stayed in the 70's so long.

    We handed in the printout along with the logic, but it just got a
    question mark or something on it, so I think we just confused the professor. But someone used to humans doing logic things is going to
    have a different idea of what's possible to brute force than someone
    who thinks it through with a computer.

    Kinda make me think that that college needed to take a page from Dartmouth and their BASIC program. It got a very high percentage of people involved in computers - and not just the one going into computers.



    ... Circular Definition: see Definition, Circular.
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    * Origin: cold fusion - cfbbs.net - grand rapids, mi (21:1/616)
  • From Adept@21:2/108 to Dr. What on Tuesday, February 13, 2024 14:45:30
    Closer to the real world than you might think. Especially if the tech lead of the project suffers from neophilia.

    "We want to use the blockchain!"

    No, you don't.

    "We want to replace everyone with AI!"

    Nope, still a bad idea.

    Yeah, it does seem like that, with a variety of things. It's not even that blockchain and AI are "bad" technologies; just that you need to know what they're good at, what they're bad at, and which of those things are true now but may not be true later.

    And if it fits the industry.

    Obviously, with K-Mart, it wasn't blockchain or AI that would've been the issue. And we're mostly talking about business people. For tech people, honestly, while it's exhausting to be changing things all the time, it's also pretty exciting to be trying new things all the time.

    It's no wonder why their IT dept stayed in the 70's so long.

    The other problem is that something that already works is generally going to outperform something that might be better, but will have teething problems. Sticking in the 70s is fine for a lot of things.

    Kinda make me think that that college needed to take a page from
    Dartmouth and their BASIC program. It got a very high percentage of people involved in computers - and not just the one going into computers.

    Yeah, that makes sense. And, honestly, anything that increases general computer literacy is probably a net positive for most everyone. If all your Political Science majors gain some basic tech understanding, maybe the next generation of lawyers and politicians will be that much more likely to understand some technical topic that's pertinent.

    I'm not _sure_ it mattered for a philosophy of logic class, since I'm not sure if the topic has changed much, realistically, in the past century.

    Though, on that note, if memory serves, this philosophy of logic class was a prereq for other philosophy classes. I'm not sure if I _took_ any other philosophy classes, but I really enjoyed philosophy of logic and doubt I would've much enjoyed general philosophy classes.

    Since, with philosophy of logic you can go, "okay, do you accept these assumptions? Then this is true. If you'd like to continue arguing, please tell me which assumption you want to change.".

    With general philosophy, "I think, therefore I am" is controversial enough that we ended up with, "I exist" and "there are thoughts", and everything else people are still arguing about.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: Storm BBS (21:2/108)
  • From Dr. What@21:1/616 to Adept on Wednesday, February 14, 2024 08:15:24
    Adept wrote to Dr. What <=-

    Obviously, with K-Mart, it wasn't blockchain or AI that would've been
    the issue. And we're mostly talking about business people. For tech people, honestly, while it's exhausting to be changing things all the time, it's also pretty exciting to be trying new things all the time.

    Trying out new things and basing a production system around something untried are two different things.

    I've experienced too much pain where we had a developer who decided New Tech X was cool and then built a critical production process around it. Never mind that no one else on the team was interested in New Tech X, didn't know New Tech X and New Tech X didn't do a much better job than the current tech.

    The other problem is that something that already works is generally
    going to outperform something that might be better, but will have
    teething problems. Sticking in the 70s is fine for a lot of things.

    It depends. This was the 1990's and they were running on hardware and software that was way past end of life. Now that's not a real big problem. Many companies out there will support you - for an arm, a leg and your first born. But that's usually a good indication that you should be moving on. And they were trying to do that, they just kept derailing themselves.


    ... First, they tax incomes; now they're taxing my patience.
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    * Origin: cold fusion - cfbbs.net - grand rapids, mi (21:1/616)
  • From Bob Worm@21:1/205 to Dr. What on Wednesday, February 14, 2024 22:36:30
    Re: Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
    By: Dr. What to Adept on Wed Feb 14 2024 08:15:24

    Hi, Dr. What.

    I've experienced too much pain where we had a developer who decided New Tech X was cool and then built a critical production process around it. Never mind that no one else on the team was interested in New Tech X, didn't know New Tech X and New Tech X didn't do a much better job than the current tech.

    Oh, yes. A hundred times... and usually said dev then leaves the company and nobody can maintain this completely bespoke thing they left behind with no documentation!

    As one of my university lecturers used to say - there's a difference between being clever and being smart...

    BobW
    --- SBBSecho 3.20-Linux
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  • From Dr. What@21:1/616 to Bob Worm on Thursday, February 15, 2024 07:43:26
    Bob Worm wrote to Dr. What <=-

    Oh, yes. A hundred times... and usually said dev then leaves the
    company and nobody can maintain this completely bespoke thing they left behind with no documentation!

    This happened a lot in my previous company. I spent countless hours de-clever-ing things that were made by people who didn't stay to maintain them.

    As one of my university lecturers used to say - there's a difference between being clever and being smart...

    And he's right on.


    ... I'd love to, but my bathroom tiles need grouting.
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    * Origin: cold fusion - cfbbs.net - grand rapids, mi (21:1/616)
  • From Adept@21:2/108 to Dr. What on Friday, February 16, 2024 14:23:13
    I've experienced too much pain where we had a developer who decided New Tech X was cool and then built a critical production process around it. Never mind that no one else on the team was interested in New Tech X, didn't know New Tech X and New Tech X didn't do a much better job than
    the current tech.

    Yeah, shiny new things. Though, also, it's generally more fun building something up yourself than figuring out what the heck the last twenty people were doing with this code that's supposedly self-commenting.

    problem. Many companies out there will support you - for an arm, a leg and your first born. But that's usually a good indication that you
    should be moving on. And they were trying to do that, they just kept derailing themselves.

    Makes sense. So, yeah, they did need to move on to something else, but they needed to actually make a choice and follow through on it, regardless of what the choice was.

    Though a large amount of tech projects fail, regardless. Just hard to get it right.

    But if your program looks like NASA's rocket building after the Space Shuttle, there may be too many bosses, changing too often, to get a good outcome in a reasonable amount of time.

    (That one shouldn't be too political; it takes time to build a space program, and if each president wants to put their stamp on things and have a bold new vision, that winds up meaning that the bold new vision will cancel out much of the previous work. Presumably the effect would be the same at Kmart.)

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
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  • From Adept@21:2/108 to tenser on Friday, February 16, 2024 14:30:57
    I used to read "Programming Pearls" in the back issues of the Journal the ACM back in college and had picked up the book. Sadly, I let it a long time ago.

    I think you meant Communications of the ACM; JACM is mostly
    theory. :-)

    I get Communications of the ACM, and it doesn't seem to have Programming Pearls, at this point in time.

    Which means _nothing_ for this discussion, but it sounds like an interesting column.

    Though Communications of the ACM is still interesting, though I'm not sure I've found any of it to be useful, practically, at this point.

    Or, heck, not sure how useful my ACM membership has been, but I like being a part of it, regardless.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
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  • From Adept@21:2/108 to Digital Man on Friday, February 16, 2024 14:55:24
    C++ (not C) appears to be the collegiate programming language of choice these days. It was Java for a while, C before that, Pascal before that, and FORTRAN before that.

    I guess I'm about 5 years removed from the experience, but I remember having classes that used Java, C++, C++11, C Sharp, some form of assembly (I'm struggling on remembering what languages we used in my embedded systems class, but it was more than one), and probably one or two things besides that.

    It really did seem like there was a new language with every course. I don't specifically remember Python, but wouldn't be surprised if I forgot about when I first used it.

    But I was not experiencing the intro-to-programming level with all these courses, as I had done that in my undergrad, some years earlier. And, at this point, I'm not entirely sure if it was Java or C++.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
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  • From Adept@21:2/108 to tenser on Friday, February 16, 2024 15:08:43
    the rest of the research community). So Communications
    used to have a lot of papers that were kind of systems-y,
    but much less these days. Communications nowadays is
    more like a magazine.

    It does seem to have a mix of things that seem like research papers and a variety of opinion articles about the computer issues of the day and the ethical way to approach them as computer professionals.

    It's also kinda fun seeing things from Vinton G. Cerf. Regardless of the topic.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
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  • From Adept@21:2/108 to Dr. What on Friday, February 16, 2024 15:25:47
    Ya, I let my membership lapse because they were moving away from computer technology and getting into more social-issues-and-stuff.

    I do tend to skip over the ethics articles. Since I tend to be more interested in the scientific aspect of, "well, what's possible?", and I'm absolutely the sort of person who would not think about "if we should", because that's more of a political question, to me.

    Well, I probably _would_ think of "if we should", but more in the context of what should be allowed as business practice, rather than scientific progress.

    But, thankfully, I tend to find the various, "what should be the ethical stance of computer people on x?" articles more boring than contentious.

    And I haven't been tasked with implementing a system that I find unethical, thankfully.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
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  • From Dr. What@21:1/616 to Adept on Saturday, February 17, 2024 08:32:58
    Adept wrote to Dr. What <=-

    Yeah, shiny new things. Though, also, it's generally more fun building something up yourself than figuring out what the heck the last twenty people were doing with this code that's supposedly self-commenting.

    I've dealt with (and still deal with) some developers who have an attitude of "I don't need to document it. It's self-evident." Ya, to you, who did the research and wrote it. But it's greek to someone else who didn't.

    But changing someone else's code is 90% of what developers do. It doesn't take too long for you to write good code when you get a chance to do the other 10% and write new stuff. Because you may be the person maintaining it in 5 years.

    There's nothing like the revelation that the horrible, uncommented, hard to read, hard to understand code that you are complaining about was written by you a few years ago.


    ... Would you like to have some pizza with that sausage?
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    * Origin: cold fusion - cfbbs.net - grand rapids, mi (21:1/616)
  • From Dr. What@21:1/616 to Adept on Saturday, February 17, 2024 08:32:58
    Adept wrote to tenser <=-

    I get Communications of the ACM, and it doesn't seem to have
    Programming Pearls, at this point in time.

    I think the Programming Pearls column was gone back in the late 1980's. But there were other, similar, columns for a while.

    Which means _nothing_ for this discussion, but it sounds like an interesting column.

    It was interesting enough to spawn off 2 books. :)

    Though Communications of the ACM is still interesting, though I'm not
    sure I've found any of it to be useful, practically, at this point.

    For my magazines, I use a 3 issue test: When the renewal comes up, I look through the last 3 issues. If I can easily find at least 1 article that I want to keep for a long time, I renew. If not, it's not worth my money.

    Or, heck, not sure how useful my ACM membership has been, but I like
    being a part of it, regardless.

    I used to think the same way. Even ignoring my 3 month test. But it reached a point that, for me, I really didn't want to be associated with it anymore. And I had to give up my acm.org email address that I had for ages.


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  • From Adept@21:2/108 to Dr. What on Monday, February 19, 2024 20:05:47
    I've dealt with (and still deal with) some developers who have an
    attitude of "I don't need to document it. It's self-evident." Ya, to you, who did the research and wrote it. But it's greek to someone else who didn't.

    Yeah. This is also why I have problems with the various code style things that are anti-comments.

    Because I want comments to tell me what was in the developer's head at the time the things were made. Yeah, it _might_ not be updated, but it'll help me more quickly understand the edge cases, or why the section exists at all.

    And then I _also_ don't have to figure out if some well-named variable means what I think it means, or _almost_ what I think it means, because theoretically the comment explained the concept well.

    But my code tends to start with comments, slowly expand out to be a ton of comments with some amount of code, then less code and slightly-more-than-I-started-with amount of comments.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
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  • From Adept@21:2/108 to Dr. What on Monday, February 19, 2024 20:14:02
    For my magazines, I use a 3 issue test: When the renewal comes up, I look through the last 3 issues. If I can easily find at least 1 article that
    I want to keep for a long time, I renew. If not, it's not worth my
    money.

    I guess I don't know how many articles I wind up wanting to keep for a long time in any magazine.

    Especially if I were to look at a news magazine or something.

    The retro gaming stuff I get, sure, even though I'm bad about actually reading them.

    I used to think the same way. Even ignoring my 3 month test. But it reached a point that, for me, I really didn't want to be associated with it anymore.

    I guess that makes sense. I think, for me, there's some aspect of, "this is the sort of thing that I'd like to have some idea of what this group of people is thinking is important", and it's a more-reliable level of quality than random web sites might be. And has better incentives / is less likely to be addictive for me.

    it anymore. And I had to give up my acm.org email address that I had
    for ages.

    And you actually _used_ it?

    I think it's been a long while since I used an e-mail address that I didn't control, aside from gmail and yahoo addresses, which I've tended to use as either throwaways, or because it's effectively something that is connected to the gmail account directly.

    Or I'm worried that my personal domain is getting e-mails sent to spam folders. But I long ago went away from having e-mail connected to things that other people control, because they tend not to have my interests at the front of their mind. Including remembering having a bigfoot.com once upon a time, that was supposed to be a "permanent" address, where you'd just have it redirect to a different address as you switched ISPs.

    But, obviously, they didn't last, or their service didn't, so it was far from permanent.

    But my domains? They're basically as permanent as I am, which is probably as good as it gets for me.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
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  • From Dr. What@21:1/616 to Adept on Tuesday, February 20, 2024 07:48:42
    Adept wrote to Dr. What <=-

    it anymore. And I had to give up my acm.org email address that I had
    for ages.

    And you actually _used_ it?

    It was very useful because it was just an email forwarding system. So I could easly change the back end email provider while keeping my email address the same.

    Or I'm worried that my personal domain is getting e-mails sent to spam folders. But I long ago went away from having e-mail connected to
    things that other people control, because they tend not to have my interests at the front of their mind.

    That's why I don't use my gmail account anymore. But setting up my own domain, email server, etc. was just too much work to be of value to me. I did locate a service that I seems to be trustworthy (so far). It's pay, of course, which helps to push it to the more trustworthy category.


    ... We have no solution, but we sure admire the problem.
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  • From Adept@21:2/108 to Dr. What on Tuesday, February 20, 2024 15:02:17
    That's why I don't use my gmail account anymore. But setting up my own domain, email server, etc. was just too much work to be of value to me.
    I did locate a service that I seems to be trustworthy (so far). It's
    pay, of course, which helps to push it to the more trustworthy category.

    Seems reasonable.

    For me, I've been hosting my own e-mail for so long that it'd be more effort to do something else.

    I don't mean _actually_ hosting my own e-mail, as that's a terrible idea; just using MxRoute to do the hosting for a whole host of e-mail addresses, including hosting my mom's e-mail. So she gets to have an address with her name in it, hopefully without too much hassle for anyone.

    And, while I think pretty highly of MxRoute (they've had a variety of times where they've gone, "we don't think we did well enough, here, so everyone on this server gets an extra year of service" or "Well, we're synchronizing things, which means that we push back the end date of what you paid for", and the service already doesn't cost that much.), if they _did_ go under, it'd be painful for a bit, but after a few days I'd have all the same e-mail addresses, just hosted on a different server.

    But, yeah, probably less work to just sign up for a forwarding service.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: Storm BBS (21:2/108)
  • From tenser@21:1/101 to Adept on Wednesday, February 21, 2024 07:25:27
    On 16 Feb 2024 at 02:30p, Adept pondered and said...

    I used to read "Programming Pearls" in the back issues of the Jo the ACM back in college and had picked up the book. Sadly, I le a long time ago.

    I think you meant Communications of the ACM; JACM is mostly
    theory. :-)

    I get Communications of the ACM, and it doesn't seem to have Programming Pearls, at this point in time.

    Which means _nothing_ for this discussion, but it sounds like an interesting column.

    It was. Programming Pearls was a regular column published
    in CACM by Jon Bentley; he collected the contents into two
    books, "Programming Pearls" and "More Programming Pearls."
    Both were interesting, though the former has more widely
    applicable to more situations than the latter.

    The first volume was given a second edition sometime in the
    early 2000s; I talked to Dennis Ritchie about it briefly
    before it was published; we were talking about something
    else and he happened to mention that Bentley had some new
    material and was discussing things like cache effects. Some
    of the content from "More" was rolled into the 2nd edition,
    but the second volume has never been updated.

    Both are, in my opinion, still worth a read. The profiler
    written in `awk` was pretty cool.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)
  • From Arelor@21:2/138 to Dr. What on Tuesday, February 20, 2024 17:28:57
    Re: Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
    By: Dr. What to Adept on Tue Feb 20 2024 07:48 am

    That's why I don't use my gmail account anymore. But setting up my own doma email server, etc. was just too much work to be of value to me. I did locat service that I seems to be trustworthy (so far). It's pay, of course, which helps to push it to the more trustworthy category.


    Running a personal email service is not that hard these days. Nowadays you can just install your favourite Linux or BSD, run some pre-made script, and watch it deploy a full email server with a fancy administration interface for you.

    The only "hard" (for a very lazy definition of "hard") is then getting your DNS records right.

    For the record, this month's Admin: Networks & Security magazine comes with a review for iRedMail, which is an email appliance that lets you run your own email service without having to think too much about the deployment.

    --
    gopher://gopher.richardfalken.com/1/richardfalken
    --- SBBSecho 3.20-Linux
    * Origin: Palantir * palantirbbs.ddns.net * Pensacola, FL * (21:2/138)
  • From Ed Vance@21:1/175 to tenser on Thursday, March 07, 2024 23:31:55
    On a Prodigy(sp?) CD years ago was a C- - Program and I think some instructions for C - - too.

    I played with it some but didn't get fluent(sp?) using it.

    NOW C=64 BASIC and IBM DOS 2.11 BASIC I DUG.

    YEP!, I'm one of those...
    --- SBBSecho 3.20-Linux
    * Origin: capitolcityonline.net * Telnet/SSH:2022/HTTP (21:1/175)
  • From Ed Vance@21:1/175 to hollowone on Thursday, March 07, 2024 23:38:59
    I liked the Tagline about XEROX Alto You used.

    Here I am typing on a Android Phone and can't STEAL that Tagline.

    Now on my XP PC the Tagline File is HUGE!!!!!!!!!!

    Why isn't Multimail available in the APP Files on this thing.

    Sometimes I have to "Praise The Lord ANYHOW".
    --- SBBSecho 3.20-Linux
    * Origin: capitolcityonline.net * Telnet/SSH:2022/HTTP (21:1/175)
  • From hollowone@21:2/150 to Ed Vance on Sunday, March 10, 2024 13:47:30
    I liked the Tagline about XEROX Alto You used.

    Thanks.

    Why isn't Multimail available in the APP Files on this thing.
    Sometimes I have to "Praise The Lord ANYHOW".

    I keep this tagline unique to 20-4-BEERS when I post from here.
    I saw list of taglines when I posted for the first time and had a thought "gosh.. another huge list of generic, boring and quite often lame taglines".

    So I'd killed all of them and at that time I was inspired by some documentary movie about XEROX Parp and how everybody stole from its prime ideas and how XEROX actually failed to monetize on its R&D.

    I'd considered this was brilliant idea to remind myself that not the inventors.. but sales force capable organizations win.. always.

    especially when I think I can invent something worth sharing :)

    -h1

    ... Xerox Alto was the thing. Anything after we use is just a mere copy.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: 2o fOr beeRS bbs>>>20ForBeers.com:1337 (21:2/150)
  • From Ed Vance@21:1/175 to hollowone on Sunday, March 10, 2024 16:15:09
    The history I remember reading said the same.
    That's why I made the comment about the Tagline You used.
    --- SBBSecho 3.20-Linux
    * Origin: capitolcityonline.net * Telnet/SSH:2022/HTTP (21:1/175)
  • From Ed Vance@21:1/175 to poindexter FORTRAN on Sunday, March 10, 2024 23:40:38
    The Tagline "Albatetize the Alphabet" brought to mind this:

    ZYXW VUTS RQ PONML KJIH GFED CBA

    Those spaces between the backward Alphabet mean pause(s).

    On a good day I can say the above in 3 point 5 seconds.

    I have to admit I have been beat two times by girls who were in the 8th Grade.

    I learned the alphabet backwards by typing the alphabet and then looking at the character on the right side, typing that character (z).
    Looking at the character to the left of the last typed character and typing it (y), and so on, so on until I typed (a).
    Then all I had to do then was look at the reversed line and repeat typing it, OVER AND OVER.

    Worked for me.

    I have to confess when saying the reversed alphabet out loud, at first (for many. many months), as I said each character my fingers twitched.
    Little finger on left hand, first finger on right hand, third finger on left hand, third finger on left hand... etc.
    For: zyxw.....

    Hope this tale was enjoyed by those reading it.

    It's the truth, it's actual, everything is satisfactual.
    Zippy-de-do-dah.......
    BTW de-do-dah doesn't mean a sublimital message in Morse Code.

    How's that for a Tagline?
    --- SBBSecho 3.20-Linux
    * Origin: capitolcityonline.net * Telnet/SSH:2022/HTTP (21:1/175)
  • From poindexter FORTRAN@21:4/122 to Ed Vance on Thursday, March 14, 2024 10:04:00
    Ed Vance wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

    The Tagline "Albatetize the Alphabet" brought to mind this:

    ZYXW VUTS RQ PONML KJIH GFED CBA

    Those spaces between the backward Alphabet mean pause(s).

    On a good day I can say the above in 3 point 5 seconds.

    There's a culty little film called "Tapeheads" from the 1990s starring
    Tim Robbins and John Cusack as out of work security guards who become
    music video directors.

    In one scene, they're at their local watering hole, looking for another
    round of drinks, when the bartender tells them he's required to give a
    sobriety test. He asks them to sign the alphabet in ASL, backwards,
    skipping the vowels. They walk through it like that's something people
    do all the time. Odd, absurd, and funny.

    https://youtu.be/Ku_wLVbIUA4?si=B_bSulJDadhtqBeY&t=120


    ... Adding on
    --- MultiMail/Win v0.52
    * Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)
  • From AKAcastor@21:1/162 to Ed Vance on Thursday, March 14, 2024 12:33:02
    On a Prodigy(sp?) CD years ago was a C- - Program and I
    think some instructions for C - - too.

    I remember seeing Sphinx C-- around in the 90s, I don't think I ever actually learned it though. By then I probably acquired a copy of Turbo C++ 3 from a friend. Looks like Sphinx C-- is still around: https://bkhome.org/archive/goosee/cmm/

    NOW C=64 BASIC and IBM DOS 2.11 BASIC I DUG.

    I totally missed the C64 era but DOS 2.11 / BASIC era was all mine! Our Tandy 100HX had MS-DOS 2.11 in ROM which I still think is one of the coolest features in a PC from that era - it booted so fast, and without a boot disk! And programming in GW-BASIC, or IBM BASIC(A), was absolutely where I got hooked on computers! I remember seeing BASIC code and thinking "these are English words, I can understand this!" was fantastic. Though of course it was the surface-level stuff like PRINT and GOTO that came so easy - I never did develop REAL expertise in BASIC. It was a fantastic launch pad into computer programming though!


    Chris/akacastor

    --- Maximus 3.01
    * Origin: Another Millennium - Canada - another.tel (21:1/162)