When programming was (still) fun
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I really enjoy hearing other people's stories about how they got into the IT jobs. Yours is a really great one.
I remember those MSDN CDs too. Lots of fun to be had. đand, you're right, the fact that "tech is everywhere" now has really dampened the enjoyment.
It was great when you went to your computer and worked on it and then forgot about it as you headed out to real life.
Smart Phones and the consequences they've created are what has really made the world quite terrible. But I'm sure đŤđŤ AI đŤđŤ and ââbrain embeddedââ technology will set everything right. đŁ -
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I think it was more satisfying (avoiding the word fun) because the technology was newer and the tools were crude. I started as a jet engine mechanic. Later, my first "system" had vacuum tubes, relays, and core storage. then we graduated to trouble shooting using bit switch programs we wrote. The "good old days" were not as good as today, which will be somebody's "good old days".
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I got hooked to computers in mid â70s, at the end of the era of punch cards and program listings on accordion paper. At the start of the first semester in CS, I meet a friend from high school, a year older and also in CS who says:
âI have a nice little problem for you. Write a program to find all the ways you can position 8 queens on a chessboard so that they donât attack each other.â
The only game in town at the time was FORTRAN, and there is no recursion in FORTRAN, and this was my first program so, obviously it didnât work. Cocky, like most 18 years old are, I said to myself âsure itâs compilerâs fault, my logic is impeccableâ so I started to look at the assembler code generated by compiler. The only problem was that I didnât knew assembler, so I started to learn assembler. Now I couldnât understand how the compiler knew what code to generate, so I started to learn about context-free grammars, LL(1) and LR(1) parsers, and so on. Never finished the stupid program, but by the end of my adventure, I was thoroughly hooked. And still am. -
I got hooked to computers in mid â70s, at the end of the era of punch cards and program listings on accordion paper. At the start of the first semester in CS, I meet a friend from high school, a year older and also in CS who says:
âI have a nice little problem for you. Write a program to find all the ways you can position 8 queens on a chessboard so that they donât attack each other.â
The only game in town at the time was FORTRAN, and there is no recursion in FORTRAN, and this was my first program so, obviously it didnât work. Cocky, like most 18 years old are, I said to myself âsure itâs compilerâs fault, my logic is impeccableâ so I started to look at the assembler code generated by compiler. The only problem was that I didnât knew assembler, so I started to learn assembler. Now I couldnât understand how the compiler knew what code to generate, so I started to learn about context-free grammars, LL(1) and LR(1) parsers, and so on. Never finished the stupid program, but by the end of my adventure, I was thoroughly hooked. And still am.@Mircea-Neacsu said in When programming was (still) fun:
there is no recursion in FORTRAN
Well, not before FORTRAN 90 anyway, and the only compiler I remember that actually checked for it was GNU g77. The others "took it as read" that it wasn't going to happen and let you do what you wanted (which was pretty much the ground state for anything in FORTRAN code!*). I used to simulate it by implementing my own stack instead of using local variables, and it worked fine (if slowly).
- Remember, you could declare a variable as a single integer and than use it as a 10 dimensional array of floting point values if you felt the need: COMMON was a handy keyword if you wanted to modify your OS from your app ...
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The Fortran I used in 1978 did allow recursion. Neither compiler nor machine was mainstream, but a proprietary 16-bit mini. Its developers were more or less "fresh from school", they had learnt the academics of compilers for languages like Algol, Simula etc. and, I was told, never learned to handle function calls without a stack. So handling recursion came at no extra expense. They didn't know how to prevent it. :-)
I do believe that the first BASIC I used in 1975, on a Univac 1110 mainfram, allowed recursion - but the manual is buried so deep down in the basement that I will not spend the time to verify it.
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I got hooked to computers in mid â70s, at the end of the era of punch cards and program listings on accordion paper. At the start of the first semester in CS, I meet a friend from high school, a year older and also in CS who says:
âI have a nice little problem for you. Write a program to find all the ways you can position 8 queens on a chessboard so that they donât attack each other.â
The only game in town at the time was FORTRAN, and there is no recursion in FORTRAN, and this was my first program so, obviously it didnât work. Cocky, like most 18 years old are, I said to myself âsure itâs compilerâs fault, my logic is impeccableâ so I started to look at the assembler code generated by compiler. The only problem was that I didnât knew assembler, so I started to learn assembler. Now I couldnât understand how the compiler knew what code to generate, so I started to learn about context-free grammars, LL(1) and LR(1) parsers, and so on. Never finished the stupid program, but by the end of my adventure, I was thoroughly hooked. And still am.@Mircea-Neacsu How did FORTRAN enforce the no recursion rule? How could it detect recursion even when indirect?
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Every Fortran function could have a flag indicating 'busy', to be reset upon return. It could be the return address: Zero it upon return, and if it is non-zero upon entry, then you have made a recursive call.
If you want to know at compile/link time: A flow analysis tool could follow all possible flow paths, graymarking every function on the current path being analyzed. If extending the path by one more call, and it hits a graymarked entry, then you have a direct or indirect recursion.
I don't know what old (pre '90) compilers did; these are jutst my thoughts about how it could be done. I suspect that a lot of implementations simply said: Oh, so the program crashed? Well, you broke the rules, it is your own fault!
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I took a programming course in BASIC as a senior in highschool. I really enjoyed it and discovered I was pretty good at it (at least compared to most of my fellow students). My class instructor said a 4 year degree was the best path to make it my career (this was in 1975). Best advice I ever followed. 4 years later I was a FORTRAN and Assembler programmer for UNIVAC, moved to C and then C++ on UNIX workstations and ended in C++ and C# on Windows PCs when I retired in 2017. Fun times indeed.
