Damn mainframe people flaunting their 16 colors like they're a peacock or something. Shit. We only had one color (and one absence of a color) and that was good enough.
16 colors is juvenile. When I was a child, I was taught arithmetic using colored rods. I grew up and today I use monochromatic screens. (paraphrased: https://groups.google.com/g/golang-nuts/c/hJHCAaiL0so/m/kG3B... )
OT: Do you know if was he being serious, joking, or "haha only serious" in the linked message?
My father is 75 and he still works, has his own software development company with his own back-office program written in cobol. He started a company back in 1991 with two other cobol programmers, they are retired now, and while almost all of the code they wrote has been replaced with c# code by younger programmers there are still some parts of the code written in cobol that he still maintains.
Random OT question: I was raised by, erm, relatively uneducated folks. Is there anything especially great about having a software programmer for a father? (As my kids have one)
I would argue that they need heavy human oversight
For sure; I'll believe that an AI can read and "understand" code, extract meaning and requirements from it, but it won't be the same as a human that knows requirements. Then again, a human won't know all requirements either; over time, requirements are literally encoded.
In systems like that you can record human interactions with the old version, replay against the new one and compare outcomes.
Is there a delta? Debug and add a unit test to capture the bug. Then fix and move to the next delta.
Very old coder here. Wrote COBOL to help Atari add features to a inventory processing system to account for the fact that "inventory" intially was items received at the loading dock, fork-lifted to the shipping dock and shipped. So "inventory" needed to be booked immediately as sales. Now I dabble mostly with Python and JS/HTML. My memory of the Atari gig was that the most critical part was the CICS code. There was j…
Ah. The birth era of creative accounting. I remember companies shipped empty CD and booked it as revenue for the quarter. The actual software when ready was delivered as a “patch”.
Surely creative accounting is a time honored tradition?
Can you describe the cultural gap? I haven't really met these folks in the wild, so I'm curious what the programmers of yore were like.
In my experience, it's usually lack of awareness about modern security risks, and lack of familiarity with modern infrastructure paradigms. The latter really isn't a problem since these systems are usually standalone, but the former does become a problem - they often are from a time where this just wasn't something to consider. As a result, these legacy systems are often using default passwords, have tons of crazy st…
Reminds of me of a TUI Banking software that ran on Sun Solaris. It could keep up as fast as you can navigate - few months in and you could fly through the screens. Then it was "upgraded" to a web-based version and all of us were up in arms, it was like being downgraded to a tractor after experiencing a racecar.
16 colors is juvenile. When I was a child, I was taught arithmetic using colored rods. I grew up and today I use monochromatic screens. (paraphrased: https://groups.google.com/g/golang-nuts/c/hJHCAaiL0so/m/kG3B... )
OT: Do you know if was he being serious, joking, or "haha only serious" in the linked message?
Most of the comments by everyone in that thread are sarcastic, and the tone of the thread is lighthearted.
Pike genuinely doesn't seem to care for syntax highlighting, though understands that his is a minority opinion.
16 colors is juvenile. When I was a child, I was taught arithmetic using colored rods. I grew up and today I use monochromatic screens. (paraphrased: https://groups.google.com/g/golang-nuts/c/hJHCAaiL0so/m/kG3B... )
OT: Do you know if was he being serious, joking, or "haha only serious" in the linked message?
i think that's at least mostly serious. he's not a fan of syntax highlighting.
Very old coder here. Wrote COBOL to help Atari add features to a inventory processing system to account for the fact that "inventory" intially was items received at the loading dock, fork-lifted to the shipping dock and shipped. So "inventory" needed to be booked immediately as sales. Now I dabble mostly with Python and JS/HTML. My memory of the Atari gig was that the most critical part was the CICS code. There was j…
I was working on CICS in the early 2000s. An insane amount of live COBOL code still moving things around (and algol and Fortran). We occasionally found bugs in code written in the 70s.
Ah. The birth era of creative accounting. I remember companies shipped empty CD and booked it as revenue for the quarter. The actual software when ready was delivered as a “patch”.
Surely creative accounting is a time honored tradition?