Working Daze by John Zakour and Scott Roberts for July 14, 2014

Sadly, this is very true (or used to be…).

Yeah, and you couldn’t code a FORTRAN output statement that won’t cause a print buffer overflow.So there!

I prefer computed “Come-Froms”

My idea of an APL programmer was someone who’d proudly come up to you and say “See this code? You’ll never guess what it does!”

Don’t look at me! The last thing I programmed in was Cobol.

Yeah, well you dereference null pointers and confuse “=” with “==” in your debugging code!

Your code is “write only” ‘cause even the computer can’t read it

Spaghetti coder!

I once had a boss who couldn’t understand “i=i+1” because they obviously couldn’t be equal! I don’t know how he would react to “i++”.

Your big ideas only need 16 bit addressing.

“You think you’re a programmer? I only program with ‘Copy con’!”

Sigh… The boys are fighting again…

Odd coincidence – I used to code COBOL in Hilo – not for long though… C came along

Goto statements? Infinite Loops? What, is this 1984?

In 1971-72 I used Fortran 4, D level, COBOL with only 8KB RAM, PL1 (supposed to be an amalgam of those two – just terrible, but my nemesis was Assembler Language.God save us from writing in Machine Language. I always wanted to create the command: RFBB. (Retrieve from Bit Bucket) and it was to be used immediately following SRR or SLR in case of screw-up. However, I was never able to figure out the address for the Bit Bucket… :-(We all celebrated when our IBM 360, Mod 20 computer with 512KB RAM was upgraded to 1 MB. A real feat because the tch had to physically install 521 KB of Ferrite Core Storage.Remember, eight bits per bite – and rolls and rolls of yellow wire tape.We were fascinated by all the blinking lights on the console – one light per Register, as our programs were processing..Remember 2×1 to the 31st power? (IIRC) . . . You haven’t lived until you have had to debug nested Do Loops !

I remember when they used to say that the [latest supercomputer] was so fast, it could execute an infinite loop in [some puny number of] microseconds!