Working Daze by John Zakour and Scott Roberts for July 15, 2014

No debate here. Each served a different purpose. Yes, I am a geek.

Gotta go with Fortran!

Not having much luck here at work trying to get people to drop RPG III/IV and return to COBOL.

LISP

People really care about such things?

ALGOL68 beats the rest!

Whatever happened to TUTOR?

Boy does that bring back memories. We had to use FORTRAN for our PDP 11/45, but I got a chance to play with an early version of LISP on an account with MIT through this thing called ARPANET. It was on something that was called Zork back in the very early 80’s.

BASIC cause it probably introduced more people to programming and as it evolved it became less basic.

Ever try programing in machine language?

Having that ongoing debate with a coworker over pascal vs c

Doesn’t C count as classic?

Our geeks probably used other languages. But we engineers were taught to program with Fortran.

John’s right, has to be basic. Back in the 80’s my job was doing maintenance with COBOL but I created a lot of simple games for my Commodores with BASIC. Non-programming friends learned a lot more from me when I showed them the game programs versus debugging homework from job.

Basic did introduce many people to programming, but it also was responsible for perhaps more bad code than all other languages because of the ease of (taking us back to yesterday) of writing spaghetti code using goto statements.

whenever I hear somebody talk about fortran or cobol is like hearing ‘back in my days’..

fortran is in the family tree of every imperative languaje, but is too basic.. just a step above assembler

cobol was widely used (therefore the y2k glitch), but besides of the y2k glitch, there were jokes that whoever learned in cobol, was destined to do bad programming (though my father used to program in cobol)

it is true that basic introduced many people to programming, but as they were introduced to programming through basic (myself included), they (we) were introduced in the wrong way (see strip from yesterday). They though it would be cool to put in the language operands like ‘switches’ with open cases (cases that don’t belong to a single value), or use variables that have not been declared, or basically anything the placed in that ugly language. Then people who started programming with that, though it was cool to use many operands that only made the code hard to read and that spaghetti programing made them ‘leet’. Everybody who started with basic had to forget what they learned (like getting rid of gotos), and learn to program well.

a pretty, nice, clean all purpose language: pascal. too bad it was basic the one included in the pc dos

the best language ever: c (and c++, java and all that came after that, derived from c). remembering dennis ritchie

I did write a complier in assembly once way back in the late 70s and I thought it was fun. I was a silly youth. I love watching “Halt and Catch Fire” it reminds me of those simpler times.

And, just how old are these two? When did they start programming?

What, no one for Ada?

http://users.cms.caltech.edu/~mvanier/hacking/rants/cars.htmlhttp://compsci.ca/blog/if-a-programming-language-was-a-boat/http://www.gksoft.com/a/fun/languages-women.htmlhttp://aharoni.wordpress.com/2007/03/15/if-programming-languages-were-bands/

taken from a list that contained more lists, but many links were broken, or were plain lame

In school – the CS126 students used BUFF-40 to do their exercises – and all their little program cards were stacked together for a (relatively) single run – spooled out to tape – and run later.

The guys in the computer room of the school’s IBM 360-20 gave us a bunch of grief about getting our Senior programs turned around in the Prof’s time limit.

We would write a couple BUFF-40 things that told the 55 line/minute printer to go to the top of the next sheet – in an infinite loop and stuff them into the 2-3 foot stack of punched cards.

The paper would arc all the way to the ceiling and almost empty the box before they could get back to the console to shut it off.

It only took “salting” a couple of the stacks to train the machine room guys to just run our stuff and we would get out of their way. At that point, for us, debugging was worse than writing.

Desperate needs – Desperate measures (we told ourselves.)

We (the group) wrote a compiler, of sorts. We called it the Simply Horrible Interpretive Translator . . . Curiously, it did work, mostly.

The first computer I encountered was a Univac 1005 (IIRC) at Hunter Army Airfield, GA, after returning from RVN in 1967.

Fortunately, I was a but a user at that time, but worked with the programmer trying to figure out what the HQ Brass wanted. But that was when I was bitten by the bug.

It was the Flight Instructor’s (creative) marking of the Mark-Sense cards that made my life “interesting”.

So long ago.

silly pseudo nerds, Pascal.

Hate to throw a monkey wrench into the fray. What about FOURTH………

TRS-DOS or the current and last version LS-DOS 6.3.1. Of course Dos Plus lV was nice, CPM less so. With Dos Plus lV you could run multiple physical and virtual drives, even quad-density drives. In my experience it was easier to run the 20 Meg HD that RS offered also.