Then and now

[RobertPatrick]

[e-mail] wrote in news: [e-mail]:

man, I loved my 78 Chrysler New Yorker.

[krw]

Like ForTran? In college we also learned PL/I, which I like a lot. Unfortunately, no one else does.

For once we agree 100% . ...except that it's worse even than that. That's one of the reasons I would have regretted going into CS. I despise all forms of C.

[krw]

A couple of years later, when I had to take the same courses for credit, we used WatFIV (no 'e'). WatFIV == WATerloo Fortran IV.

In the EE department, we had a couple of Bendix G-20s pulled out of the scrap. Fortunately I never had to use them (avoided those courses). I did a lot of work on the analog computers, though. I was the only one who did.

[krw]

My mistake. Your syntax led me to believe that you were talking about the System-36, but wasn't sure.

[Nate Nagel]

Most had at least some passing experience with programming, but none knew of FORTRAN as anything other than a historical curiosity.

possibly? I don't know - only programming experience that I have is a little messing around with BASIC in middle school, and then that one class. Oh, and a psychology experiment that I took part in partly for the money and partly because a girl I was dating was somehow involved in, that had something to do with studying *how* people learn to program by using a computer-based teaching tool to teach LISP. I think I actually picked up some stuff there, but never applied it.

In retrospect, *either* ME or CS would have been a poor choice, because either way I probably would have been laid off eventually :/ (ME because the automotive industry, in which I was primarily interested, is all but dead in the US, and CS because that's slowly but inexorably moving offshore) Unfortunately, I did graduate with a BSME... was fun, but I'm certainly not working in my field. At least I have a job...

nate

[krw]

I don't know why anyone would expect them to. ??

When I first took ForTran in high school, they wanted to see *if* high school students could learn it. I suppose the answer is obvious now, but they seriously questioned it then (programming was only for math and engineering grad students at the time).

It really isn't. There is still a *lot* of it done here, though it has changed.

I have a BSEE, and have been working in the field since '74. I retired once and went back for even more fun. ;-)

[Vic Smith]

Code - even assembler - can be structured and commented to take care of that. But hardly anybody did it in my experience. Shop standards help, but they often weren't followed. There was plenty of COBOL spaghetti coding done too. Even a well structured program can be hard for the next guy to decipher. COBOL helped since data naming conventions were pretty easy to decipher, and there was more of a push for structure. But I basically agree with you. Writing a program that works is one thing. Writing one that works efficiently and is easy for the next guy to modify is something else.

--Vic

[Vic Smith]

That you were being taught Fortran and PL/I just shows how sick the U.S. education system is. Both those languages were basically dead in 1980, when I started working in IT. Yet they were still being taught at my state U. In fact I only needed a PL/I course to get my degree. Didn't bother. Total waste of time, but it was the department head's pet language. Never hurt me not having a degree either.

There was some collaboration between business and the school though. My COBOL instructor was really an IT guy moonlighting, and got an internship program going with one of his clients. Picked me as the first intern. Not because I a particularly good student, but because I was older than the other students, had a wife, kids, a job, and a car. He figured I'd at least show up on schedule at the client, almost 40 miles away. I showed up. Woody Allen said "Eighty percent of success is showing up." Probably true. Then maybe you add 10 percent luck.

When I retired 4 years ago I was running a crew of H-1B Indians. The entire place - one of the largest IT shops in the country - was full of Indian H-1B's. They were well schooled in India, and cheap to buy. Polite, and hard-working too. Why bother looking at U.S. schools? Nobody has a plan or America's future. It's dog eat dog. My youngest son graduated from U of I, engineering. He worked an IT web language job here for about a year, then moved to Australia, where he's worked as an engineer ever since.

They offshore the engineering work too, and bring in H1-B's. It's funny how many here think only manufacturing jobs are going away. Think the Indians/Asians are stupid. Nope. I was a steelworker, autoworker and had other mfg jobs before I went into IT. Saw the writing on the wall. Also saw the white collar writing on the wall, but my timing was right. Hey, that's the other 10 percent to get to 100 percent of success - timing.

--Vic

[notbob]

Of all the mopars I owned, my '94 Plymouth Satellite was probably my favorite. I was now a happy family man and the roominess, convenience, and comfort of a 4-door was not lost on me. Yet, the damn thing, with a basic 318, was both plenty powerful and very responsive, handling wise. I put new radials on it and it was amazing. No wonder they were the premier cop/stunt cars in Hollywood for 10 yrs. Cheap, yet great handling.

nb

[The Daring Dufas]

Are you sure it was a '94? :-)

TDD

[notbob]

DOH!!!

Good catch, DD. I meant a '74. Before that I had a '66 of the same make/model. I bought the '66 for $400 and drove it 80 miles a day for 5 yrs before it did a Bluesmobile on me. ;)

nb

[The Daring Dufas]

Got-ya! I thought it reminded me of a 20 year older model. I had a '75 Fury I named Christine because you couldn't kill it. :-)

TDD

[krw]

For me, in '67-'68 and '71, yes.

Bullshit. Besides the '60s and '70s coming before 1980, ForTran is _still_ big in scientific disciplines (for it's imaginary support and math libraries) and PL/I, while not being huge, is still used. Even COBOL is still used.

That's you, hardly the universe of IT.

Absolutely true, except that you make your own "luck". It takes work.

Which U of I?

Except they aren't. They are changing.

I've never heard that one. Too far to the opposite, in fact.

Sure. Unions are dead, except those on the public dole.

[Vic Smith]

Fortran is egghead stuff. Always has been. Eggheads aren't IT people, but have no problem programming any language that suits them. I suppose some are still using APL too. My school was Northeastern Illinois and the purpose of the computer courses was to gain skills to get a job in business, not science. The degree wasn't even called CS then, it was InfoScience. Hell, I didn't know algebra. Still don't. But I spent +25 successful years in the business, working for both major corporations and consulting companies, and never met a Fortran programmer. So Fortran was dead for my purposes, and so was PL/I. Everything I did was assembler, Cobol, and a smattering of other languages that got sold to IT managers as the latest panacea. A preferred language is often just tradition or "religion." I could do any mathematical function in COBOL that Fortran could do by making a subprogram call. I could code binary bytes in COBOL, and did on occasion. If you know it you know it. As computers beefed up in power what became important in business computing was program maintainability, because programmers were expensive, and so were system glitches. Probably not so important now. Just bring some cheap Indians in, don't pay benefits, and have them fix things. Anyway, I'm done arguing about languages. BTDT.

You're right on that. But then I was talking only about me.

Work is a given.

Illinois.

What world was that you live in?

You hear it every day and all day if you listen to the "experts" in charge of the American economy. "We must lead in the "new economy" by educating everybody in the new technologies." What a crock. Half of America can't tie their shoes while India and China pump out shiploads of engineers. It all gets down to work ethics. They disappeared when Wall Street said everybody would be rich.

Unions were a part of it. But most of the non-union manufacturing is gone too. The biggest part was U.S companies could get cheap labor offshore, and better management that paid attention to quality. They sold the store. Same goes for white collar IT/engineering type jobs now that foreign schools are geared up.

--Vic

[krw]

Eggheads exist. Egghead stuff exists. Always has.

The point being that your "Both those languages were basically dead in 1980", is false. Both live to this day, though are, and always have been, specialized.

Then it's still not called CS. ;-)

In your small little world, perhaps not.

C is dead for my purposes, too. That's not to say that C is dead.

No issues with that.

Wrong. By your own admission you don't even touch a huge area of mathematics.

Sure, you can use an entire word to store a byte. Sometimes it's even the right thing to do. ;-)

Now you're not even talking about languages. ;-)

You have a funny way of talking only about you. ;-)

UIUC? So did I. It's one of the top EE schools.

The real one. There are small companies everywhere, doing their own thing.

You're far more cynical than I.

They're the single reason the auto and steel industries are all but dead. "All but", only because of domestic non-union car manufacturing.

No, it's not. It's just different.

You've obviously never dealt with offshore production.

"IT" has been over-sold and under-educated for decades. I taught MIS courses, um, twenty-five years ago. Pitiful.

[clare]

The "4th generation" programming languages are even worse - they generate all their own code, and every line SUCKS.

And careful, Lightning DOES sometimes strike twice in the same spot!!!

[clare]

Correction It was fortran 4 (language) with the waterloo compiler 4 in Fortran IV with WatFor, and Fortran 4 (language) with waterloo compiler 5 in Fortran IV with WatFiv, or watfive, or wat5. All were used.

The language was Fortran (for formula translator) and the compiler was a separate program. Fortran is a compiled language, like C, not a translated? language.

The same code could be compiled to work on different processors and operating systems just by feeding the code into the proper compiler.

[clare]

Bet that Satelite was NOT a '94 though!!

[krw]

The acronym was as I stated above. It was stated as such, in the book from the University of Waterloo. Yes, WatFour was also ForTran IV, but it made a nice acronym.

Hence "ForTran", not "Fortran" (as in "BASIC", not "Basic"). It is a translated language, the compiler translates from ForTran into assembler. The assembler output was just a JCL statement away. WatFour/FIV also had a /CLG option, to Compile, Link, and Go, sorta-kinda like an interpreter to the user.

s/"translated"/"interpreted"?

BASIC is (classically) an interpreted language. A compiler is a translator (translates the HLL into another language, often machine). An interpreter does a statement at a time.

Sure, as with all compiled languages. A compiler that runs on one computer and produces code for another is called a "cross-compiler". Of course that only works with trivial programs (no I/O) if the computers have different operating systems.

[Vic Smith]

Actually my original point was in reference to Nate saying he was being taught PL/I and Fortran in a mid-nineties CS class. Most CS grads were going into the business IT world, and those languages were useless and dead for business by then. An engineer type has no problem picking up a language like Fortran or PL/I to suit his needs. No sense quibbling. I take what I said back, and now say, "Both those languages were basically dead in the 1980 business world."

"Small" is all perspective of course. But in terms of business IT my world was far from small.

Don't know much about C. There was some demand for it in the mid-nineties. I met a Bell Labs guy - Geroge - in about 1980 who was on the team developing it. One of the C programmers under my umbrella when I was an account manager, and whose technical skills I respected, told me it was a dead end, since the functions had all been written, and that's where the "fun" was. That was mid-nineties.

Believe me, you don't need to know higher math in business IT. That's what mathematicians and accountants are for. All you have to do is put their formulae in code and test it. They wouldn't have it any other way. If it's too complex to code in the language at hand, somebody has written a sub-routine in a suitable language to call. Just like you got those functions performed by your calculator.

Most of my experience is....mine. Can't help that. All I got.

He was at Champagne. General Engineering. Don't ask me what they do. But he's doing fine in Australia working for a construction outfit. Some kind of project planning work.

Right. That accounts for real 15% unemployment.

More like realistic.

Sure. The GM engineers were designing quality products, and GM management was taking good care of customers. It was all the workers fault with their evil unions. Bet you liked your Chevy Vega except for the worker labor part. BTW, my first job out of the Navy in '67 was at U.S. Steel South works. Decrepit blast furnaces while the rest of the world had moved to BOP. The millwrights I worked with could shave babbitt bearings and the sweethearting Steelworkers union got them all of 3 bucks an hour. There was a book written how the CEO drove that company to ruin.

After that I went to IH building dozers and dealt with the management incompetence there. Another place that went bust, but I won't bore you with my personal observations. They involve production and the QC thereof, so don't count.. A book was written about how Archie McCardle drove IH to ruin too. Never read either book, but since I was at both places as a Steelworker and Autoworker I guess it was all my fault and I got the blame. Bastards.

You mean just because "Made in China" is stamped on damn near everything a consumer buys, it's different? Okay, I'll go along with that.

You might notice that imported items are getting higher marks than Ford, GM and Chrysler in general. That boat has sailed.

Anybody who knew BASIC could get a job teaching MIS 25 years ago. Had a buddy who did that for a while. Excuse me if your IT credentials don't impress me.

--Vic