I'm a Relic
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I remember fondly the heyday of computer programmers. We were a curious mix of wizards and gods, silently tapping away at keyboards, shunning those new-fangled mouse things as long as possible. We were cowboys, outlaws, and warrior poets weaving titanic tales of bytes and opcodes, roaming the electronic frontier during the burgeoning era of personal computers, free to do as we pleased, and answering only to our peers. We could cram amazing amounts of code into just 4K of memory because we knew assembly language and we knew the value of just a single byte of memory. We fed off the tit of mother COBOL, and her evil cousin, Fortran, and we praised Pascal for it's type safety, and sheer elegance. We dabbled fearlessly in LISP, mastered the DOS commandline, knew the difference between extended and expanded memory, and decided early on that Windows was Hell incarnate. We taught ourselves C and then C++, still thinking tight and efficient code mattered to someone other than ourselves. We struggled to learn MFC's quirks and eventually began to fondly recall the exquisite and deft code used to circumvent the library's limitations, or as we put it, extend it's usefulness. And then came .Net and cookie-cutter applications. Suddenly we were thrust into the maelstrom of "me-too" programming, populated by 12-year olds who believe that the OS should be web-based, and that have no awareness nor respect for those who came before - those who could write 100,000 line programs from scratch with nothing more than a few hastily scratched verses on a post-it note. I'm a relic. I like the old days. I like the old ways. There. I've said it.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001The difference between your programming peek and mine is that a few scribbles on a post-it note would be just a few lines of code from scratch and not your unmanageable 100,000 lines. Embrace the future and the product of your hard work. You should be happy to see younger programmers emerging and their idea will mature with them.
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I remember fondly the heyday of computer programmers. We were a curious mix of wizards and gods, silently tapping away at keyboards, shunning those new-fangled mouse things as long as possible. We were cowboys, outlaws, and warrior poets weaving titanic tales of bytes and opcodes, roaming the electronic frontier during the burgeoning era of personal computers, free to do as we pleased, and answering only to our peers. We could cram amazing amounts of code into just 4K of memory because we knew assembly language and we knew the value of just a single byte of memory. We fed off the tit of mother COBOL, and her evil cousin, Fortran, and we praised Pascal for it's type safety, and sheer elegance. We dabbled fearlessly in LISP, mastered the DOS commandline, knew the difference between extended and expanded memory, and decided early on that Windows was Hell incarnate. We taught ourselves C and then C++, still thinking tight and efficient code mattered to someone other than ourselves. We struggled to learn MFC's quirks and eventually began to fondly recall the exquisite and deft code used to circumvent the library's limitations, or as we put it, extend it's usefulness. And then came .Net and cookie-cutter applications. Suddenly we were thrust into the maelstrom of "me-too" programming, populated by 12-year olds who believe that the OS should be web-based, and that have no awareness nor respect for those who came before - those who could write 100,000 line programs from scratch with nothing more than a few hastily scratched verses on a post-it note. I'm a relic. I like the old days. I like the old ways. There. I've said it.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001I remember at the first time I saw a mouse(the computer kind) being disappointed that it didn't look more like a mouse(the rodent kind). I was attending a user group in Stamford in the late 70's and there was an Apple Lisa on display. I soon realized that I was there for window dressing (the old-fashioned kind) among the mostly middle-aged men. And, yes, I learned how to keypunch the most code on a Hollerith card possible. No mention on trying to decipher an IBM manual. MSDN Library is clarity itself in comparison :)
Marianne G. C. Seggerman This above all, to thine own self be true and it follows as the night the day thou canst not then be false to any man.
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I remember fondly the heyday of computer programmers. We were a curious mix of wizards and gods, silently tapping away at keyboards, shunning those new-fangled mouse things as long as possible. We were cowboys, outlaws, and warrior poets weaving titanic tales of bytes and opcodes, roaming the electronic frontier during the burgeoning era of personal computers, free to do as we pleased, and answering only to our peers. We could cram amazing amounts of code into just 4K of memory because we knew assembly language and we knew the value of just a single byte of memory. We fed off the tit of mother COBOL, and her evil cousin, Fortran, and we praised Pascal for it's type safety, and sheer elegance. We dabbled fearlessly in LISP, mastered the DOS commandline, knew the difference between extended and expanded memory, and decided early on that Windows was Hell incarnate. We taught ourselves C and then C++, still thinking tight and efficient code mattered to someone other than ourselves. We struggled to learn MFC's quirks and eventually began to fondly recall the exquisite and deft code used to circumvent the library's limitations, or as we put it, extend it's usefulness. And then came .Net and cookie-cutter applications. Suddenly we were thrust into the maelstrom of "me-too" programming, populated by 12-year olds who believe that the OS should be web-based, and that have no awareness nor respect for those who came before - those who could write 100,000 line programs from scratch with nothing more than a few hastily scratched verses on a post-it note. I'm a relic. I like the old days. I like the old ways. There. I've said it.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001Me, too. I typed my first computer program on a keypunch machine. Last time I used my knowledge of keypunch was when I figured out that the holes on my Federal Income Tax Refund check were my husband's and my social security numbers. I do prefer the multi-colored Windows monitors to the old green letters on gray terminals. Wouldn't go back to them if you paid me!
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I remember fondly the heyday of computer programmers. We were a curious mix of wizards and gods, silently tapping away at keyboards, shunning those new-fangled mouse things as long as possible. We were cowboys, outlaws, and warrior poets weaving titanic tales of bytes and opcodes, roaming the electronic frontier during the burgeoning era of personal computers, free to do as we pleased, and answering only to our peers. We could cram amazing amounts of code into just 4K of memory because we knew assembly language and we knew the value of just a single byte of memory. We fed off the tit of mother COBOL, and her evil cousin, Fortran, and we praised Pascal for it's type safety, and sheer elegance. We dabbled fearlessly in LISP, mastered the DOS commandline, knew the difference between extended and expanded memory, and decided early on that Windows was Hell incarnate. We taught ourselves C and then C++, still thinking tight and efficient code mattered to someone other than ourselves. We struggled to learn MFC's quirks and eventually began to fondly recall the exquisite and deft code used to circumvent the library's limitations, or as we put it, extend it's usefulness. And then came .Net and cookie-cutter applications. Suddenly we were thrust into the maelstrom of "me-too" programming, populated by 12-year olds who believe that the OS should be web-based, and that have no awareness nor respect for those who came before - those who could write 100,000 line programs from scratch with nothing more than a few hastily scratched verses on a post-it note. I'm a relic. I like the old days. I like the old ways. There. I've said it.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001I am nearing the traditional retirement age. I remember learning the IBM 1620 totally on my own. My college’s 1620 had 40,000 digits of core. The 1620 was sometimes called CADET (Can’t Add Doesn’t Even Try) because memory locations (decimal) 001xy needed to contain the result of x+y (the digit “flag” held carry.) Multiply tables used locations 00200 to 00399. A NOP took 160 uSec. All programming done with tab cards – often called IBM cards. Several jobs later I did OS CDC 6000 series mainframe OS code. The max core in the mainframe was just under 1 megabyte and it would have been an entire MB if words had been 64 bits wide rather than 60 bits wide. The I/O processors were 4Kx12-bit. Much of the OS ran in these. Still using cards and batch mode. Interactive development was just starting to be almost useful. 640K limit? Gimmie a break. 6000 series I/O processors had 6K. (But characters were 6 bits wide. Perhaps that made it an 8K machine.) Later I did a bunch with the 8085/Z80 microcontrollers. Max memory 64K for RAM and ROM. And that was 64K total not each. I used CP/M and (are you ready for this?) CP/M-86. I even got my company to buy WordStar for CP/M-86. I did the 8085 firmware for the Fulcrum Computer Products OmniDisk. It deblocked physical sectors into the 128-byte sectors CP/M used. CDC decided to kill SCOPE (the OS with 75% of the user community) in favor of the mainframe OS developed at the corporate HQ in Minneapolis. I moved on to a company developing a terabit storage application using reels of 2-inch wide videotape. The tape in those reels was a mile long. Multiple tape transports were needed to get to a terabit. We copied tape blocks to 3330 disk packs with only the core in a PDP-11 system. We had to do it on the fly because it would cost too much to have a half a dozen 64K blocks of buffer storage. Today, a terabyte (125MB) disk drive is almost too small for many personal computers. I have had some fun with 30yo engineers telling them how core memory worked. They know all the required physics but have not a clue how ferrite beads could be configured into a memory module. ‘Nuff reminiscing using WinWord in a (32-bit version of XP) running on a 64-bit CPU with a gig of RAM. Classical guitar music mp3 files are playing in the background. I’m in the Silicon Valley. Anyone needing a software generalist please visit hmtown.com
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I remember fondly the heyday of computer programmers. We were a curious mix of wizards and gods, silently tapping away at keyboards, shunning those new-fangled mouse things as long as possible. We were cowboys, outlaws, and warrior poets weaving titanic tales of bytes and opcodes, roaming the electronic frontier during the burgeoning era of personal computers, free to do as we pleased, and answering only to our peers. We could cram amazing amounts of code into just 4K of memory because we knew assembly language and we knew the value of just a single byte of memory. We fed off the tit of mother COBOL, and her evil cousin, Fortran, and we praised Pascal for it's type safety, and sheer elegance. We dabbled fearlessly in LISP, mastered the DOS commandline, knew the difference between extended and expanded memory, and decided early on that Windows was Hell incarnate. We taught ourselves C and then C++, still thinking tight and efficient code mattered to someone other than ourselves. We struggled to learn MFC's quirks and eventually began to fondly recall the exquisite and deft code used to circumvent the library's limitations, or as we put it, extend it's usefulness. And then came .Net and cookie-cutter applications. Suddenly we were thrust into the maelstrom of "me-too" programming, populated by 12-year olds who believe that the OS should be web-based, and that have no awareness nor respect for those who came before - those who could write 100,000 line programs from scratch with nothing more than a few hastily scratched verses on a post-it note. I'm a relic. I like the old days. I like the old ways. There. I've said it.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001John Simmons / outlaw programmer wrote:
Suddenly we were thrust into the maelstrom of "me-too" programming, populated by 12-year olds who believe that the OS should be web-based, and that have no awareness nor respect for those who came before
I would'nt say that about all the young programmers. When I first started programming all I had was an old Pentium 100 with Windows NT 4.0. I did not have any development software or compilers at the time so I was stuck with QBASIC 1.1. I still loved it though. Then I finally got a C compiler. It was one of Borlands old compilers that ran on DOS. All the BASIC C and C++ programming I have done was on DOS, that was all I had. I tried to write the smallest most efficient programs I could possibly write. I even knew how to program the VGA card and interact directly with the keyboard in DOS. I started to learn x86 assembler in Windows and I tried really hard to make Windows programs using assembler. MFC was another thing that I partially learned, I hate MFC, it just seems poorly designed to me. When I discovered C# and .NET I was able to do so much with it. It have me power that is almost comparable to C++ and I had a well designed API to work with(.NET). C# lets me do almost all the things C++ lets me do, it give me pointers, I can use Win32/64 APIs, generic programming, and things that C++ does not have such as properties, parameterfull properties (aka indexers), interfaces, and a clean object model that just makes sense. And over time we will continue to see more features of C# and .NET such as LINQ and more speed improvements with the JIT, garbage collector, and a better optimizing compiler.
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Steve Echols wrote:
microsoft's M.exe editor
I still remember Edlin. Hey!! My fingers also remembers how to type it fast enough! :laugh:
"It's supposed to be hard, otherwise anybody could do it!" - selfquote
"No one remembers a coward!" - Jan Elfström 1998
"...but everyone remembers an idiot!" - my lawyer 2005 when heard of Jan's saying aboveI still sometime finding myself typing "vi" editor commands even in .NET's editor window. It was hell to learn and near the ulitmate in counterintuitive. But, it had two things going for it. 1) Once you did learn it, you could code/edit extremely fast. 2) It was the best universal editor for Unix/Linux. (Now to all those Emacs fans out there, I have to admit I never learned it because it was more complex, but more so because not every Unix variant or installation had it installed while I could always count on vi being there. And, when using X-windows or a good terminal emulator, you could cut and paste between files just like on Windows. --------- On a similar, slightly related note. I've always been puzzled that computers are about 1000 times faster than they were 25 years ago, yet Word 2003 doesn't work any faster than WordPerfect 5.l for DOS did.
Andrew C. Eisenberg Nashville, TN, USA (a.k.a. Music City USA) (Yes Virginia, there are rock and roll stations in Nashville! :laugh:)
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WordStar, heh, heh, I remember the CPM/MPM days....
............................. There's nothing like the sound of incoming rifle and mortar rounds to cure the blues. No matter how down you are, you take an active and immediate interest in life. Fiat justitia, et ruat cælum
Robert M Greene wrote:
WordStar, heh, heh, I remember the CPM/MPM days....
Heck then you should remember the baby blue processor! I was in heaven when we finally had a version of wordstar on the PC. I remember sending them a driver for the HP LaserJet when it first came out to swap for free copies of the software. I still carry it around in my personal BIN though I guess I haven't used it in a couple of years. I think now adays there is just too bloody much chaos to focus or things have too many elements to even know where to begin. Peole understood the zen of having peace and quite to focus on a solution.
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I remember fondly the heyday of computer programmers. We were a curious mix of wizards and gods, silently tapping away at keyboards, shunning those new-fangled mouse things as long as possible. We were cowboys, outlaws, and warrior poets weaving titanic tales of bytes and opcodes, roaming the electronic frontier during the burgeoning era of personal computers, free to do as we pleased, and answering only to our peers. We could cram amazing amounts of code into just 4K of memory because we knew assembly language and we knew the value of just a single byte of memory. We fed off the tit of mother COBOL, and her evil cousin, Fortran, and we praised Pascal for it's type safety, and sheer elegance. We dabbled fearlessly in LISP, mastered the DOS commandline, knew the difference between extended and expanded memory, and decided early on that Windows was Hell incarnate. We taught ourselves C and then C++, still thinking tight and efficient code mattered to someone other than ourselves. We struggled to learn MFC's quirks and eventually began to fondly recall the exquisite and deft code used to circumvent the library's limitations, or as we put it, extend it's usefulness. And then came .Net and cookie-cutter applications. Suddenly we were thrust into the maelstrom of "me-too" programming, populated by 12-year olds who believe that the OS should be web-based, and that have no awareness nor respect for those who came before - those who could write 100,000 line programs from scratch with nothing more than a few hastily scratched verses on a post-it note. I'm a relic. I like the old days. I like the old ways. There. I've said it.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001How True. It was pure heaven when I was successful in compiling a C program on a Z80/CP/M machine with only two 5 1/4" floppy drives and 64KB RAM.:). It was so much fun trying to save a few bytes in the assembly language program. Somehow, I feel that kind of challenge is missing now. I now feel like laughing at myself when I recollect the arguments that I used to make saying that Windows is nothing but a SHELL around DOS. I evny the current set of software artists who are able to make a PC do so much without all the grinding that we had to go through. ganesh kalmane
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I remember fondly the heyday of computer programmers. We were a curious mix of wizards and gods, silently tapping away at keyboards, shunning those new-fangled mouse things as long as possible. We were cowboys, outlaws, and warrior poets weaving titanic tales of bytes and opcodes, roaming the electronic frontier during the burgeoning era of personal computers, free to do as we pleased, and answering only to our peers. We could cram amazing amounts of code into just 4K of memory because we knew assembly language and we knew the value of just a single byte of memory. We fed off the tit of mother COBOL, and her evil cousin, Fortran, and we praised Pascal for it's type safety, and sheer elegance. We dabbled fearlessly in LISP, mastered the DOS commandline, knew the difference between extended and expanded memory, and decided early on that Windows was Hell incarnate. We taught ourselves C and then C++, still thinking tight and efficient code mattered to someone other than ourselves. We struggled to learn MFC's quirks and eventually began to fondly recall the exquisite and deft code used to circumvent the library's limitations, or as we put it, extend it's usefulness. And then came .Net and cookie-cutter applications. Suddenly we were thrust into the maelstrom of "me-too" programming, populated by 12-year olds who believe that the OS should be web-based, and that have no awareness nor respect for those who came before - those who could write 100,000 line programs from scratch with nothing more than a few hastily scratched verses on a post-it note. I'm a relic. I like the old days. I like the old ways. There. I've said it.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001Well said, John! Raise a cup to $59 development systems and OSs that cost less than the hardware they slow down.:beer:
"...a photo album is like Life, but flat and stuck to pages." - Shog9
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I remember fondly the heyday of computer programmers. We were a curious mix of wizards and gods, silently tapping away at keyboards, shunning those new-fangled mouse things as long as possible. We were cowboys, outlaws, and warrior poets weaving titanic tales of bytes and opcodes, roaming the electronic frontier during the burgeoning era of personal computers, free to do as we pleased, and answering only to our peers. We could cram amazing amounts of code into just 4K of memory because we knew assembly language and we knew the value of just a single byte of memory. We fed off the tit of mother COBOL, and her evil cousin, Fortran, and we praised Pascal for it's type safety, and sheer elegance. We dabbled fearlessly in LISP, mastered the DOS commandline, knew the difference between extended and expanded memory, and decided early on that Windows was Hell incarnate. We taught ourselves C and then C++, still thinking tight and efficient code mattered to someone other than ourselves. We struggled to learn MFC's quirks and eventually began to fondly recall the exquisite and deft code used to circumvent the library's limitations, or as we put it, extend it's usefulness. And then came .Net and cookie-cutter applications. Suddenly we were thrust into the maelstrom of "me-too" programming, populated by 12-year olds who believe that the OS should be web-based, and that have no awareness nor respect for those who came before - those who could write 100,000 line programs from scratch with nothing more than a few hastily scratched verses on a post-it note. I'm a relic. I like the old days. I like the old ways. There. I've said it.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001You bring back memories of the good? old days when a program had to be designed because it wouldn't fit in memory. I still remember punching cards and being careful about the order you put them into the card reader so that it would run. JCL and DD statements anybody? Chris
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I remember fondly the heyday of computer programmers. We were a curious mix of wizards and gods, silently tapping away at keyboards, shunning those new-fangled mouse things as long as possible. We were cowboys, outlaws, and warrior poets weaving titanic tales of bytes and opcodes, roaming the electronic frontier during the burgeoning era of personal computers, free to do as we pleased, and answering only to our peers. We could cram amazing amounts of code into just 4K of memory because we knew assembly language and we knew the value of just a single byte of memory. We fed off the tit of mother COBOL, and her evil cousin, Fortran, and we praised Pascal for it's type safety, and sheer elegance. We dabbled fearlessly in LISP, mastered the DOS commandline, knew the difference between extended and expanded memory, and decided early on that Windows was Hell incarnate. We taught ourselves C and then C++, still thinking tight and efficient code mattered to someone other than ourselves. We struggled to learn MFC's quirks and eventually began to fondly recall the exquisite and deft code used to circumvent the library's limitations, or as we put it, extend it's usefulness. And then came .Net and cookie-cutter applications. Suddenly we were thrust into the maelstrom of "me-too" programming, populated by 12-year olds who believe that the OS should be web-based, and that have no awareness nor respect for those who came before - those who could write 100,000 line programs from scratch with nothing more than a few hastily scratched verses on a post-it note. I'm a relic. I like the old days. I like the old ways. There. I've said it.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001640K! You're a newbie! I learned on an IBM 1620 (20,000 decimal(!) digits). It was big and cheap for its time - late 50's, early 60's. Keyboards! IBM 26 card punch for program entry. Boot up via console keys and a golf-ball typewriter. Mouse? What the &$%! is that? The languages were Gotran (easy for the students - we were too cheap to buy the Fortran compiler) and SPS (not so easy). Its nickname was CADET (Can't Add, Doesn't Even Try) because its add routines were loaded into core memory. Boy, could you screw up other people's programs if you knew how to overwrite these routines. DOS was not even thought of (no disks)! Ours didn't even have tape (the paper variety). Golden Oldie
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I remember fondly the heyday of computer programmers. We were a curious mix of wizards and gods, silently tapping away at keyboards, shunning those new-fangled mouse things as long as possible. We were cowboys, outlaws, and warrior poets weaving titanic tales of bytes and opcodes, roaming the electronic frontier during the burgeoning era of personal computers, free to do as we pleased, and answering only to our peers. We could cram amazing amounts of code into just 4K of memory because we knew assembly language and we knew the value of just a single byte of memory. We fed off the tit of mother COBOL, and her evil cousin, Fortran, and we praised Pascal for it's type safety, and sheer elegance. We dabbled fearlessly in LISP, mastered the DOS commandline, knew the difference between extended and expanded memory, and decided early on that Windows was Hell incarnate. We taught ourselves C and then C++, still thinking tight and efficient code mattered to someone other than ourselves. We struggled to learn MFC's quirks and eventually began to fondly recall the exquisite and deft code used to circumvent the library's limitations, or as we put it, extend it's usefulness. And then came .Net and cookie-cutter applications. Suddenly we were thrust into the maelstrom of "me-too" programming, populated by 12-year olds who believe that the OS should be web-based, and that have no awareness nor respect for those who came before - those who could write 100,000 line programs from scratch with nothing more than a few hastily scratched verses on a post-it note. I'm a relic. I like the old days. I like the old ways. There. I've said it.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001It was a long time ago, that i've had that emotion of 'being into it' or that nice shimmering enlightment of 'that's how that piece works and now i know how to play god on it, muahahahaha'. To be true, nowadays i have similir contests running in my mind while moving in 'JavaScript'-elevators through the levels of the famous 'Html'-Building, sometimes meeting 'CSS'-Agents. And at the end of the day leaning back into my sharp Cabriolet cruising through the '.Net'. It is always a puzzle. And there must be a clue. But since i was that 'James Bond'-type of coder in the old days i am just a wreck of remembrance playing 'programming - a novel written by a heck of idiots'-detective. I'm not a bit literally like real relicts of these days. But i know what it does mean to a young one to built something on an level of abstraction that could be easily compared to the magic of riding through wormholes while cooking coffee. I was always cooked up and in heat like a b*#$& when i finished my self setted target of maneuvering data-packets through the '8-bit'-hood remote controlled by a pack of flags and some fine-furnished raster-interrupts. Just to visualize 256 colors of possible 16 in a resolution four times higher than the hardware was officially able to produce. It was about breaking bounds. The system was me ~ I was the system. Just one in a big bunch of those kind. But, i was...
Well, i really don't know if any of this might have had helped you if you're through with practicing it, but maybe? Just try it, take your time. If you got special questions you're free to send me an e-Mail. Please be specific and precisely as you're able if you're asking for help. You know, code is poetry, fine and tasty; ...but taste sometimes isn't discussable. You're Welcome, Paeth.Claudius-Raphael
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The difference between your programming peek and mine is that a few scribbles on a post-it note would be just a few lines of code from scratch and not your unmanageable 100,000 lines. Embrace the future and the product of your hard work. You should be happy to see younger programmers emerging and their idea will mature with them.
Do you really think that? Why it is, that these cool people always telling that something isn't right even if it was made that way, felt right, lived right, died right. My Opinion: I am not happy about the emerging youngs, though i'm just 29 years old and should be happy also. Just because i see too much of those wannabe-informatics, -designers and -professionals everyday talkin' bull%&%t. They're mostly not able to imagine what a micro-processor is or what it does. They learn Java in a way the tutorials told when it was born. They read what is necessary, not what could bring 'em on a bit, even if it's the same the read the seven books before. They do it just to make a job... That's okay, but i beg on anyone who just wants to make a job: SHUT UP!
Well, i really don't know if any of this might have had helped you if you're through with practicing it, but maybe? Just try it, take your time. If you got special questions you're free to send me an e-Mail. Please be specific and precisely as you're able if you're asking for help. You know, code is poetry, fine and tasty; ...but taste sometimes isn't discussable. You're Welcome, Paeth.Claudius-Raphael
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I remember fondly the heyday of computer programmers. We were a curious mix of wizards and gods, silently tapping away at keyboards, shunning those new-fangled mouse things as long as possible. We were cowboys, outlaws, and warrior poets weaving titanic tales of bytes and opcodes, roaming the electronic frontier during the burgeoning era of personal computers, free to do as we pleased, and answering only to our peers. We could cram amazing amounts of code into just 4K of memory because we knew assembly language and we knew the value of just a single byte of memory. We fed off the tit of mother COBOL, and her evil cousin, Fortran, and we praised Pascal for it's type safety, and sheer elegance. We dabbled fearlessly in LISP, mastered the DOS commandline, knew the difference between extended and expanded memory, and decided early on that Windows was Hell incarnate. We taught ourselves C and then C++, still thinking tight and efficient code mattered to someone other than ourselves. We struggled to learn MFC's quirks and eventually began to fondly recall the exquisite and deft code used to circumvent the library's limitations, or as we put it, extend it's usefulness. And then came .Net and cookie-cutter applications. Suddenly we were thrust into the maelstrom of "me-too" programming, populated by 12-year olds who believe that the OS should be web-based, and that have no awareness nor respect for those who came before - those who could write 100,000 line programs from scratch with nothing more than a few hastily scratched verses on a post-it note. I'm a relic. I like the old days. I like the old ways. There. I've said it.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001I agree, I remember the "civilised" world of DOS 3.22 and I'm only 27 (or is that old?)! The "command line" was the instrument of operation, and Windows was a shiny pipe dream. Where you could acidentally snap the legs off of your SIPPS RAM chips, and you didn't need a heat-sink or fan. Where a 14.4 modem was fast, and an 80286 12MZH was cutting edge! :-) I, am also a relic, and miss the old days too. Beware of programmers who carry screwdrivers......
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John Simmons / outlaw programmer wrote:
I'm a relic. I like the old days. I like the old ways. There. I've said it.
.NET has given me a lot more power and flexibilty. The kind of stuff I've always dreamed about having. But as far as all this web-based stuff goes, I feel like a relic too. To me, the web apps UI are clumsy and no where near rich enough to do the kind of interfaces I require. (Okay, you can get some good UI's but usually with 300% more work than a standard desktop app) I can see that web-services are a useful, but only when used with desktop client applications. The rest of this Web 2.0 malarky leaves me cold.
Michael CP Blog [^] Development Blog [^]
I'm exactly on the same page with you Michael. I've tried numerous times to get "in" to developing web applications but I just won't go there! Fortunately I work on the "back end" code for our application so I don't mess with that Web GUI stuff. Yuck! -bruce
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Yep, we're the old dogs now. Personally, I think being an old dog rocks. Wouldn't go back to being 20 again for love or money. And yet, there are things that have changed in the "me 2" world of programming that I could certainly live without. Whoever decided that HTML was a valid basis for application programming should be taken outside and summarily executed, in an exceedingly slow and clumsy manner so as to be a fitting punishment. If we have to write software using a clumsy word processor as a platform, then I'm glad we have VS and .NET. At least it almost feels like programming again. However, the :baaaa!: mentality of this business just astounds me. We have a worldwide TCP/IP network. Why in heaven's name aren't we using a more powerful platform for development then a markup language that's less sexy than WordStar? Arf.
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes www.PracticalStrategyConsulting.com
>> Whoever decided that HTML was a valid basis ... << Yeah ... I just never could understand the reasoning behind this myself. I have *tried* a number of times to get myself interested in writing code for the web but I just can't latch onto it. I've been writing code for about 30 years now - and few programming techniques I've ever seen are less intuitive or require more work - that is, except assembly language; and I'd actually rather go back to that! At least assembly has some semblance of order! Oh well ... I just let the young kids fool around with the web GUI stuff and I'll just keep writing the business rules and let them build the presentation layer. If I need to do anything GUI I'll just keep it on the desktop. I hate trying to write this stuff to work within a browser. -bruce
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I remember fondly the heyday of computer programmers. We were a curious mix of wizards and gods, silently tapping away at keyboards, shunning those new-fangled mouse things as long as possible. We were cowboys, outlaws, and warrior poets weaving titanic tales of bytes and opcodes, roaming the electronic frontier during the burgeoning era of personal computers, free to do as we pleased, and answering only to our peers. We could cram amazing amounts of code into just 4K of memory because we knew assembly language and we knew the value of just a single byte of memory. We fed off the tit of mother COBOL, and her evil cousin, Fortran, and we praised Pascal for it's type safety, and sheer elegance. We dabbled fearlessly in LISP, mastered the DOS commandline, knew the difference between extended and expanded memory, and decided early on that Windows was Hell incarnate. We taught ourselves C and then C++, still thinking tight and efficient code mattered to someone other than ourselves. We struggled to learn MFC's quirks and eventually began to fondly recall the exquisite and deft code used to circumvent the library's limitations, or as we put it, extend it's usefulness. And then came .Net and cookie-cutter applications. Suddenly we were thrust into the maelstrom of "me-too" programming, populated by 12-year olds who believe that the OS should be web-based, and that have no awareness nor respect for those who came before - those who could write 100,000 line programs from scratch with nothing more than a few hastily scratched verses on a post-it note. I'm a relic. I like the old days. I like the old ways. There. I've said it.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001Yes, I am a Relic too :omg: from Assembly to Dot Net, yes we got lot of things but we have lost lot of things too... like knowledge of Data Structures, and memory usage. Now every kid on the block, who donot even know what is Stack, Queue Link List, etc is calling it self Programmer :wtf: :laugh:
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