Yep. Business colleges teach Fortan. Not that anybody USES Fortran for business programming (since the days of the IBM 1130), but Fortran is the easiest language to use to teach the important stuff.
In other words, Fortran is the means to the end, not the end in itself.
COBOL "still used"?
There are more lines of COBOL code in production than any other language. Most financial back-room stuff is in COBOL. For example, almost the entire Social Security System EDP is in COBOL. There are many production programs, written back in the 60's, that are still running in production every day.
These examples may say more about the unchangeability of the financial system than the COBOL language, but they're interesting nevertheless.
BASIC is often used, poorly, in that way. Pascal was designed specifically to teach programming. OTOH, depending on how you define your limits, no programming is the end in itself. ;-)
ForTran is really a scientific language, not because of the language's design rather because it's always been done that way so all the math libraries and things like vector processing support are done in ForTran.
I would certainly pick no bones over that, except that they were never used that heavily in the business world. ;-)
Right, but business IT is a small corner of the world of programming. A rather important corner for IBM, however, who still like PL/I (and derivatives) quite a lot. ;-)
Still is, but that's not my point. For *MY* purposes, it's dead. The world in general has a *lot* of other purposes. Without a doubt, more programs are written in C today than any other language, and probably by a few orders of magnitude.
"All the functions have been written" is rather like "everything that can be invented, has".
Again, not the point. I'm sure you're very good at what you do.
Yes. ForTran. ;-)
Champaign. ;-)
Design armys? ;-)
Sounds right.
There is a big difference between manufacturing and manufacturing employment. The US manufactures more than it ever has. Manufacturing is a lower percentage of employment, however, as one would expect.
No, cynical.
Now look at salaries, benefits, and union productivity obstacles, not to mention union thuggery. It was *not* all management's fault that GM sank. ...and it will continue, perhaps even more rapidly now.
A lot of that is tax policy, too, as well as union work rules.
You see nothing that the unions did wrong here?
Oh, cut the bullshit. We were talking about US manufacturing. There are a
*LOT* of cars made by non-union shops, right here in the US and quite competitivelyA lot of those "imported items" are not.
Do you expect any new industry to maintain its infant growth rate forever?
Who said I was an IT professional (as I said above, I'm an EE)? We weren't discussing one little sector of the economy, either.
Interpreted was the word I was looking for.
A lot of the programs the major insurance companies run on - particularly the actuarial stuff in the life insurance business is STILL Fortran. Same programs developped in the '60s, still running with modification after modification.
Depends exactly what business you are talking about, I quess. Clarica Insurance, formerly Mutual Life of Canada, now part od Sun Life, depended (and likely still does) very heavily on its Fortran based programs in the actuarial sciences.
That's not exactly what I said, it was that a ME professor who assigned a program in Fortran for homework, and was incredulous that nobody could complete it. Still a sign of a disconnect with reality IMHO :)
nate
what is your opinion of EE or Civil as a viable degree?
both are "viable" If you are not looking for a lifetime job guarantee. Civil engineering is harder than some jobs to send off-shore, and EVENTUALLY there will need to be electrical engineering done in north america. Might be a good idea to studi Punjabi , Sanskrit, Mandarin, and a few other eastern languages along with the engineeing if you expect to be very valuable in the future though.
I highly doubt that. Most of us engage in many business transactions every day. Just guessing, but my estimate is 90% of programming is business/finance related.
He was a nerd that way, but I saw his point. There are only so many common math functions used in business. That's not to say new processing needs don't arise or the work ends. He just found doing anything twice boring. And IT is basically repetition of the same concepts over and over. You get some new stuff now and then, like new database structures and access language, OOB and the like, most recently html and .net, blah, blah. I was working SAP data warehouse and ABAP when I retired, but wasn't young enough to be excited about it. Same old. Input, move, tweak and present data. BTW, SAP is a fast-spreading German enterprise-wide IT solution, and the Indians have 2 legs up on running it. They train in India assiduously. Don't know if the Indian government has a hand in IT training, but the Indians sure have a plan and a goal to employ as many in IT as possible. I see nothing like that here in the U.S. Despite rampant unemployment. In fact the U.S. corporate trend is to continue offshoring work, Obama's bullshit notwithstanding.
I see what you're saying there, and you're correct. But I didn't mean to imply that COBOL and Fortran are equal, or that business processing touches all the scientific math areas. My point was more to how languages gain fans in their own communities, and that Fortran could easily be replaced by COBOL with calls to assembler sub-routines. No Fortran at all in the mix. But why bother disturbing Fortran fans? If it's working for them that's good enough.
hehe. I recommended he join the FBI when he got his degree. He looked at me like I was crazy.
You can twist figures however you want. This might be of interest.
I'll cop to skeptical. That's it.
Same union at Ford, but huge difference in outcome. "Union thuggery." Funny. You going to trot out a story about how your dad was beaten with baseball bats because he refused to strike. Already heard that one.
Nope. There were never fat wages at U.S. Steel or IH. Just incompetent management. I was there. No "work rule" impediments either. Biggest difference was when a foreman at U.S. Steel told you do something that would get you killed, you might do it. At IH you would tell the foreman to go f*ck himself. Nothing wrong with that "work rule" to me. Details upon request.
You get off the union bullshit. I was talking manufacturing and now you're ragging on unions. Plenty of non-union manufacturing was offshored. First off I only buy union made cars, because I like Chevys. No choice. But most Chevys are union-made - in Canada, a foreign country. I guess I could buy a German or Jap union-made import, or a non-union one made here, but I'm sticking with Chevys. Anyway cars aren't a big expense for me since I get them used and cheap. My car costs don't even come close to $300 a year. I wrench and so does my kid. I just got off the phone ordering a Mexican-made Kenmore fridge for $700 to replace the $500 Mexican-made fridge I bought about 5 years ago and which just started making serious noise today.. A Mexican fridge for a Mexican fridge. A few years ago I spent $600 on a Mexican GE washer and another $200 on a warranty for it. Earlier this year I spent about a $1000 in computer components to build a new box. Nothing made in the U.S. I probably spent $1000 this year on various electronic gifts for my kids. Nothing made in the U.S. Spent a few hundred on power tools. None U.S.made. Got a U.S. made nail set and hammer. Big whoop. My next expense will be a flat screen TV. Probably another $500 for small, at least $1000 for big.. Tell me where to find one made in the U.S. Anybody can read a balance of trade chart for manufactured goods.
As you see if you read the article above, some of U.S. manufacturing is non-tradeble products. So I buy U.S. made toilet paper. All the junk mail I get is U.S. made. That's all part of your American "manufacturing" claim. I don't have the figures on tradable vs. non-tradable, but it's easy to read balance of trade charts for manufactured goods. Don't need to though when you can see everything you're buying is made elsewhere. Where the hell are you getting U.S made products besides Jap and German cars made here? You buying Boeing airplanes? Good on you. But you might soon be buying Chinese airplanes. Non-union made.
Easy claim to make, but if there's no U.S. made counterpart to compare against what's the difference? You don't have a choice. Ok, I'm done with this. It never goes anywhere. You take the last shots.
--Vic
LOL!.....
On Thu, 30 Dec 2010 19:47:49 -0500, snipped-for-privacy@snyder.on.ca wrote:
Maybe so. But I spent years at Allstate and CNA insurance and knew State Farm and Farmers Group employees and talked shop with them. Those are major insurance companies. It was 90% COBOL and assembler. That covers a gamut of the usual insurance company processing, and I worked in the major insurance processing areas - premiums, claims, accounting, investments. Did payroll elsewhere, all COBOL. Never saw a Fortran app anywhere, and I got around to most areas. Doubt there was any tucked away either, unless somebody was running Fortran from a PC. I had access to the system libraries and would have seen it. Pretty much knew all the programming tools where I worked. Might have been tucked away somewhere. I never say never. And though casualty isn't life, most insurance processing is as i said. You run into "scientist" users who prefer a language, but they are a small part of business processing. I had a client at McDonalds corporate marketing who liked using SAS for some day-part analysis. He got no help from me. Marketing staff there were still using Macs and they got just a little help. But that's not why I was there. McDonalds actually did analysis on what was sold at different hours of the day. Massive amounts of data coming in from POS terminals. First time I heard the term "terrabyte" but I left before they got the IBM drives in. Boucoup expensive. Now anybody can get multiple terrabytes cheap at Best Buy. Reminds me of the data management boss there. First day there I grabbed maybe 100 cylinders of disk to run something. That was no big deal in my previous shop, and about the same bytes as what I had on my big PC hard drive at home. I get a call from data management a few minutes later asking what's up. I told them what's up, and that was that. They asked me to call first next time I want that much space. Later that day I'm out front for a smoke and I get introduced to the data management boss. "Vic? Rings a bell. You the guy who hammered my space?" "C'mon," I said. I got that much on my PC hard drive at home. "Bring it in." he says. Not much for words, but I liked him and we got along fine. Closest to actuarial I got was working for an epidemiologist at International Mineral and Chemical. Similar mortality study to actuary I think. He loved me, because I built a huge table and report process for him for a study he was doing. Used COBOL. At that time COBOL - ANSI 74 I think - had a 32k max for indexed table size. I needed to store and access about a dozen times that. About 18,000 deceased employee vitals, work site and job position. Mostly Florida phosphate workers. I started a Rube Goldberg of multiple tables to handle it, mentioned my predicament it to an "old-timer" who was really sharp, and he showed me how to trick COBOL by defining filler area beyond the allowed table size in working storage and subscripting into it. Slower than the binary search on the search end, but it ran fine. Never met another programmer who knew that one. It was a good start to my IT first job, and I won't forget Mike. Lots of ggod guys I learned from, and I tried to pass it all on. God dammit! Gimme another beer and a hanky!
--Vic
I think you would be wrong, considering that even toasters have a computers in them, today.
He was myopic.
That part I understand.
That's something kids here don't do. They don't do *anything*, other than perhaps Nintendo and maybe round-ball, assiduously.
They really have no choice. It's too expensive to hire people here. Obummer is piling on a *lot* more crap, too.
Sure, but it's fun to tweak the zealots. Me? I do assembler (don't care what) and VHDL. But I don't do much programming, per se. C ruined that fun.
One of our embedded programmers left a year ago to join the FBI. They asked him whether he wanted white-collar or counter-terrorism detail. He chose counter-terrorism.
It's not twisting anything. The fact is that we *are* producing more than ever, albeit with a smaller percentage of the workforce. Since more people are doing non-manufacturing work, this is expected. COmpanies are off-shoring because they simply can't afford to hire people here, and it's not only because they want too much money. Our government forces the issue.
Prestowitz' article has a lot of holes in it.
No, skeptical means you're still looking for the strings. ;-)
Not really. Ford was on the ropes a short couple of years ago but did get some concessions that GM didn't get. Why? ...if the government is going to hand the keys over to you.
That's exactly what it was. Unions colluded to strike one company, forcing it to knuckle under. If the companies had done the same they'd the bosses would be in jail.
My father would never have worked in a union shop. Neither would I. They're vile.
You're blind.
Unions aren't part of manufacturing? You whine about management, but want the poor unions left alone?
Sure. I've talked about government policy as the other shoe.
Wouldn't touch one, particularly now. I had one, hated it.
That's funny. The appliances I've bought in the past couple of years were made in the US.
I'll bet the processors were.
Few are. Some are surprising, though. I just bought a router lift, made in Canuckistan.
We still are the #3 exporter of manufactured goods. The balance of trade is horrible primarily because of fuel imports. Nothing will be done about that, other to than put us deeper into a recession.
Everything *YOU* buy is made elsewhere.
At Lowes, in fact.
Certainly you have a choice. You don't even take it when it's offered.
So, you write a long screed, much of it in error, and run off? Whatever.
There is nothing wrong with either but don't expect any guarantees. Don't go deep into debt to get the paper.
I'm an EE and have had no problem finding a job, but I have a lot of experience and history. I'm sure it would be a lot more difficult to break in now, even though the mid-'70s were no picnic either. I did get in at the tail end of the "lifetime employment" era. As Clare says, don't expect anything of the kind, but there are also some amazing opportunities for the right sort of person.
I had a 70 MGB. You'd get to work on that almost any day, particularly if you needed to get home!
Everything last so much longer on a car today. Certainly internal engine parts. Cars really are a lot better. So are TVs, what you had to go through when color first came out. Now some of those old products were substantially built, and money was spent on appearance (chrome bumpers, furniture cabinets for TVs), but technology has made them a lot more reliable and less of a pain to own and operate.
Jeff
No thanks, I'll keep my
? "Jeff Thies" wrote
Oh, the MG, Healy, and a few others wee nice care if you could keep them running. I didn't mention it, but care from the early 50's would often need a ring job (and maybe bearings) at 50,000 miles. Today, 200,000 is nothing.
OK so what abt health care?
Such as a biochemistry degree.... or pharmacy degree?
Something for a 40 something to switch careers to?
Pharmacy is something like 5 years. Pays well though, seems steady as we get older.
Forget that! The government will tell you when to take a bathroom break.
Biochem is useless unless you go all the way to the PhD level. Pharmacy? Obama will own you.
What do you want to do?
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