Working Daze by John Zakour and Scott Roberts for January 15, 2015

Hey, now we are getting somewhere. Jay, can we change to COBOL please. I’m getting nowhere here at work with that suggestion. And I still have my LISP Manuals and my FORTRAN and COBOL compilers.

Looks it’s time get out that old RatFor (Rational Fortran) pre-processor. I think it’s on tape backup.And check your book shelve for Software Tools

She doesn’t know what it looks like so just say yes and ignore the suggestion.

I did FORTRAN on punch cards. Never good at it. Give Rita a deck of cards and let her loose. Maybe see will lose interest quickly.

And we’ll input all of the code on punch cards

Reading expands your horizon. We here all read the comics, and look where that has taken us. ;-)

Index the cards, and skip all odd numbers, that way you can fill in additional cards later, and keep the same order of the cards.

New punch cards are not available from suppliers I’ve found and only unpunched ones on salvage sites. This might be a reason for a buying trip; I’ve only found rebuilt card punch equipment in India.

as I understand, ‘hipster’ is in, and as most hipster and mac owners that go to a Starbucks to pretend they are writers, some hipsters go to public spaces with a mechanical typewriter to pretend ‘I am more hipster than thou’. Why not do the same thing with apps and open a new market? start selling a card reader and card puncher that can be attached to a cell phone, start selling the fortran compiler as a paid app, and even if it fails, Rita does not seem to care whether it goes well or it bombs as long as she can tell she did something, why should you care if is not yours whose head is at play? and if it fails as would be more probable, you just did what you were told

FORTRAN is still huge, the numeric libraries of many science and engineering analysis software is written in FORTRAN. FORTRAN compilers produce code even more optimized than C ones do.

Hey, now, I currently program in Fortran every day and have done so for the last 10-15 years. Theoretical chemistry in undergrad, grad school, and postdoc, and now weather modeling. Those are two of the fields still dominated by Fortran.

Then again, my license plate is FORTRAN, so you know my allegiance. (Also, vim forever, emacs never!)

Fortran was the first real language I learned (not counting Basic) it has it’s place in the world just not great for apps.

ermm.. object oriented programming. I am not sure why I missed that

No good deed goes unpunished, Jay. Especially when you try to help Management. They must all relinquish their souls before entering that realm….

Anyone here use PLATO back in the day?

not that i have to use multidimensional arrays too often, but if ever, I get your point, and in that case, I would probably use a single dimension array and make my own functions to deal with indexes (as in example [i] [j] [k] = example [(i * i_max) + (j*j_max) + (k * k_max)]), so I don’t have to keep counting brackets

A nice [face-palm], though …

I know it is a good thing when people read. Everyone should read. …. But who taught Rita how to read? Its giving her ideas.

ermm.. more like (as in example [i] [j] [k] = example [(i * j_max * k_max) + (j*k_max) + k)], or something like that), you get the idea