no it isn't. The word 'patch' was used to mean 'a small fix' hundreds of years before computers were even invented. e.g. patching a hole in a sweater.
Don't be a spoilsport :-) Always cooler to retro-actively patch the origins of popular terms..
And that, kids, is why we call it a “Patch”
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Re: And that, kids, is why we call it a “Patch”
#42no it isn't. The word 'patch' was used to mean 'a small fix' hundreds of years before computers were even invented. e.g. patching a hole in a sweater.
Don't be a spoilsport :-) Always cooler to retro-actively patch the origins of popular terms..
Did you know the letter 'A' was invented for the 1983 TV show, the A-Team?
Re: And that, kids, is why we call it a “Patch”
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
HR's function at a large company is to defend the company against you.
Oooooh and also, if you're not paying for the product, you -are- the product. Leave these glib platitudes at Reddit.
Actually, it's a testable hypothesis. This is the inverse of what you believe, I presume?
It seems trivial to find a counter example to your claim...
It seems difficult to support even the weaker claim, that there exists an HR department at a large company that defends your interests against that company.
I wonder why you seem so convinced of your position?
Re: And that, kids, is why we call it a “Patch”
#44That's amusing, but the linguistics sounds wrong to me. The "patch" tool was written by Larry Wall (of Perl fame) in the early 80's based on the preexisting diff format. Neither had much ancestry in common with paper tape storage, which was never really a Unix thing.
You think Larry Wall chose the name with no reference to existing terminology?
I'm saying there's no evidence that this terminology has anything to do with paper tape
Re: And that, kids, is why we call it a “Patch”
#45no it isn't. The word 'patch' was used to mean 'a small fix' hundreds of years before computers were even invented. e.g. patching a hole in a sweater.
Is there an old use of the word patch that doesn't directly relate to physical holes (eg., would someone call fixing a tear a "patch"?). If no, then the line of reasoning still makes sense, because without punch cards there would be no physical holes to patch.
Re: And that, kids, is why we call it a “Patch”
#46My favorite is "log", named after logbooks. Logbooks have maritime origins, where the ships speed is recorded. Even today, speedometer on ships are in many languages called "a log" since the original method consists of throwing an actual log overboard with a string attached to it. The string would have knots with regular intervals. To determine the speed, you count how many knots pass through your hand in a certain t…
> To determine the speed, you count how many knots pass through your hand in a certain time. But how did they count "a certain time"? (Before stopwatches).
The origins of precise clocks is because ships needed to calculate how far they had travelled in terms of longitude (eastwast/westward. How far you've travel north/south is easy to calculate by how high the sun goes).
The British crown established an award for whoever could come up with a precise clock of this reason, it's a fascinating story, I recommend the book "Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time" by Dava Sobel.
Re: And that, kids, is why we call it a “Patch”
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
What prop did you use to explain pekludge_()?
Wow, this is an obscure reference. Nothing at all turns up on DDG, and two results on google: One Slashdot comment from seventeen years ago, and two undocumented lines in an attachment from the Eclipse IDE bugzilla: https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=9569&cid=1418091 https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/attachment.cgi?bugid=436478&ac... This may be the most obscure reference to a thing that clearly exists that I've ever s…
Can't be too obscure; I've got 15 upvotes already. :)
But here's the story: In 2003, jzwinck and I were desk neighbors at a company everyone here has heard of whose original technology was written in the 1980s on computers made by Perkin-Elmer, a big government contractor most famous for screwing up the Hubble telescope's mirror.
Instead of pids, processes had names. You could send a command to them like this: "SEND MYPROG EXIT" and then, if you wrote your program to accept an EXIT command, it would run your subroutine. This was also used for interprocess communication.
Then PE stopped making computers, and the company switched to Unix, but didn't want to rewrite all its IPC code. So it wrote a Fortran function called PEKLUDGE that took a string parameter representing the program name and stored it somewhere so that it could be used to receive IPCs later. The first thing every program did from that point on was call this function with the first arg from the command line, which was supposed to be the program name plus maybe a number if the machine needed to have multiple copies running.
Then they switched from Fortran to C for all new programs, and the way to call old Fortran functions in C was to lowercase the name and add an underscore.
And that's the story of why every program at this company starts with a call to pekludge_(argv[1])
Re: And that, kids, is why we call it a “Patch”
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe just to make the desks look clean? But yeah, HR... everyone's favourite department, it seems.
HR's function at a large company is to defend the company against you.
And to provide jobs for Women. Usually the only female "executive" job is running HR.
Re: And that, kids, is why we call it a “Patch”
#49Things like this are great to remind ourselves of some of the rationale for the ways things are. When I worked at a company which used a lot of Fortran, I kept a punch card at my desk. Among other things this made it easier to explain to new people why there was a column limit for code. Eventually an HR person came around and told me to remove the card because the top management was coming to visit soon. Among other…
> Eventually an HR person came around and told me to remove the card because the top management was coming to visit soon. Among other things this made it easier to understand the role of HR in a large company. What on earth?
Around that time, the same HR department decreed that nothing in anyone's cubicle could protrude higher than the inter-cubicle divider wall, about nine inches.
One employee had to take down a little American flag (this was two years after 9/11) and another, a trophy the company had given him.
Re: And that, kids, is why we call it a “Patch”
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Punch card's date back to 1725 so the term may relate to literal bugs. Though, not in what we think of as computers.
Language nit-pick: in English, we just use "s" to make words plural, no apostrophe is needed. The correct way to make "card" plural is "cards."
Like oxen, geese or sheep?