A disturbing new trend?

[Marc Clifton]

PIEBALDconsult wrote:

When I first learned BASIC in the '80s, the only structure available was the array,

Then C introduced the struct. Then C++ decided struct should have methods, and called it a class and added all sorts of other artifacts (inheritance, polymorphism, and encapsulation.) Then came along relational databases, and we were introduced in C# to a newfangled way of working with structures, the DataTable, DataView and DataSet, but those caused impedence mismatches so a new artifact was born, the ORM. Then the jar-heads decided to inflict themselves on the process because this was all too complicated and created JSON, a string "structure" that took us back to the BASIC 80's of untyped data and structure encoded in the string itself. Simultaneously, the "kids" (who were not even a glimmer in the eyes of their parents in the 80's) decided that relational databases were bad and gave us NoSQL, which, guess what, uses JSON, is document oriented and requires client-side callbacks to "join" data across documents. And this is called progress. Marc

Imperative to Functional Programming Succinctly Higher Order Programming

[PIEBALDconsult]

Marc Clifton wrote:

Then C introduced the struct.

Exactly, even Pascal has records (?), variant records as well. Of course in Perl you'd have to use a hash ( X| ), but at least it's something.

[PhilLenoir]

To say nothing of COBOL. No please, say nothing of COBOL!

Life is like a s**t sandwich; the more bread you have, the less s**t you eat.

[PIEBALDconsult]

I didn't. I didn't even think it. Until now, thank you very little.

[PhilLenoir]

:doh:

Life is like a s**t sandwich; the more bread you have, the less s**t you eat.

[PhilLenoir]

I'd heard of COBOL.NET, but since I last touched COBOL almost 30 years ago I though I'd do a quick search. I found this:

program-id. Program1 as "ConsoleHelloWorld.Program1".
data division.
working-storage section.
procedure division.
display "Hello World"
goback.
end program Program1.

X|

Life is like a s**t sandwich; the more bread you have, the less s**t you eat.

[BillWoodruff]

The fourth example uses a jagged array, an array of arrays, not quite the same thing as a 2-d array, and under-the-hood in .NET: "If you write some simple code using jagged and multidimensional arrays and then inspect the compiled assembly with an IL disassembler you will see that the storage and retrieval from jagged (or single dimensional) arrays are simple IL instructions while the same operations for multidimensional arrays are method invocations which are always slower" [^].

« I am putting myself to the fullest possible use which is all, I think, that any conscious entity can ever hope to do » HAL (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer) in "2001, A Space Odyssey"

[PIEBALDconsult]

BillWoodruff wrote:

not quite the same thing

Pfft, details. :rolleyes:

[Andy Brummer]

I once worked with a developer that couldn't figure out why this:

for i=0 to a.length
response.write(a[0])
end

output the same value over and over again. He had only worked with ADODB recordsets.

Curvature of the Mind now with 3D

[Roger Wright]

PIEBALDconsult wrote:

When I first learned BASIC in the '80s, the only structure available was the array,

When I first learned BASIC in the '70s, the only arrays we had were 1 dimensional, 20 DATA 12, 22, 15, 'X' . . . 120 READ A, B, C, $D 130 GOTO 9999 . . . 9999 LPRINT A, B, C, $D 10000 END

Will Rogers never met me.

[PIEBALDconsult]

Oh, then having two was like twice as many. The BASIC I learned even had matrix operations built in!

[Roger Wright]

:-D :-D :-D My HP-67 calculator was, at the time, far more advanced than the version of BASIC available then.

Will Rogers never met me.

[PIEBALDconsult]

Roger Wright wrote:

HP-67

1867? :-D

[Garth J Lancaster]

COBOL's a pleasure compared to RPG !!! (IBM AS/400 for example)

[Marakai]

This entire thread brought a tear to my eye! Here I was thinking I'm the only grizzled fossil among a million "please, sirs, to send me the codes" or "can you do my programming homework for me?" and find that I am not alone! There are others whose first programming ventures were indeed programmable *calculators*? (TI-57 in my case) Mayhaps who thought that BASIC was a dumbing down and that Real Programmers used Assembler - when they were lazy and didn't just want to hack in 6502 machine code? *sniff* Vale atque ave, amici, vale atque ave!

[Sander Rossel]

So is the trend that teachers can't teach or that students can't learn? :rolleyes:

It's an OO world.

public class SanderRossel : Lazy<Person>
{
public void DoWork()
{
throw new NotSupportedException();
}
}

My blog[^]

[Mark_Wallace]

Ah, the good old days... I was early enough not to taught that the string is a data type, but that it's an array (which it still is, but no-one bothers to try to get that into their heads any more), and I've twice seen people reinventing the string by creating an array of characters that can be truncated, searched through, etc. And if I had a penny for every vacant stare I've seen when linked lists were mentioned... * * I could probably buy a Mars bar, but I'd rather let everyone's imagination exaggerate it for me

I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!

[Member 10707677]

I'll match your HP-67 and raise you an HP-35. (Bargain price $397 [3 weeks before HP-21 came out at $180 RRP])

[Simon ORiordan from UK]

Well of course, we 'ad it 'ard. I used to get up at one in the morning, before I went to bed, and hand-punch cards with lines of Fortran IV. Then I'd assemble them into a batch, and place them in the card reader with a weight on top. You tell young kids today what a 'batch file' is, and they don't believe you! :-\

[Bernhard Hiller]

Exactly. When reading Piebald's post, also I thought of some "serialized as text" compatibility mode. That's progress in these times...