Posted on 05/23/2017 2:03:47 PM PDT by Kid Shelleen
For the last 30 years, C has been my programming language of choice. As you probably know, C was invented in the early 1970s by Dennis M. Ritchie for the first UNIX kernel and ran on a DEC PDP-11 computer. I am probably a bit old-fashioned. Yes, C is outdated, but I’m simply addicted to it, like plenty of other embedded system programmers. For me, C is a low level but portable language that’s adequate for all my professional and personal projects --SNIP-- And after you’re finished with this review of 1970s-era computing technology, give one or two a try!
(Excerpt) Read more at circuitcellar.com ...
I wasn't very forward thinking. One instructor used to tell us things like someday we would order groceries by computer and have them delivered. Bet he didn't fortell the iphone though. Maybe he did.
I think I’m the only one that’s done Ada.
I learned Basic, Fortran, Cobol and Assembly in college and maybe Pascal.
When I started working in the mid 80s it was in Fortran, and then moved to Ada and C. The defence department was pushing Ada, but industry was pushing C. I think we know who won that battle.
Then went to C++ and Objective C in the 90s.
I haven’t worked in over 20 years. Wish I could get back into it.
Could never get Lisp.
Fortran
Assembly
Job Control Language
Insert Character under mask.
Store character under mask.
Branch and link stack.
In College, it was Basic to FORTRAN to COBOL, with a little ALGOL and LISP thrown in for fun. Took the IBM BAL course as well, but didn’t use it much.
My first job was writing COBOL on a Data General machine. 32KB memory, the COBOL program had some cool twists and turns to make it work in that little memory. My favorite part of that project was that we had to send magnetic tapes to our Honeywell mainframe. The DG machine’s native output was 7-bit ASCII (what we called “half-ASCII”), which the MF could deal with, provided you noted it in the tapes header records, which had to be in SIXBIT notation. The real fun was that the header had two fields, date and record count, that needed to be calculated and written on the fly. Talk about headaches!
Outgrew that stuff and moved to 4th-Generation DBMS languages, like FOCUS and NOMAD, and stayed there for 30+ years with the vendor and later as a consultant and developer. Until my last employer decided that they could get some 20-nothing Indian kid to do my job at about 10% of my salary.
Today, I fiddle with HTML and PHP, using MySQL databases as the backend. For smaller stuff, it’s MS/Access and VBA. Not exactly cutting edge, but someone has to maintain those old systems!
LISP was way out there - but if you got the hang of it, recursions, it was fun. Not at all like anything procedural, and not like an object.
Funny, now I have students who do miserably in Python,but who thrive in C++ because C++ has more rules.
“Each to his own said the old lady as she kissed the cow.” As my grandma said.
I actually wrote a FFT in LISP as a class project.
Yes I was once insane! .... but I got better!
T h e V O G O N N e w s S e r v i c e
VNS TECHNOLOGY WATCH: [Mike Taylor, VNS Correspondent]
===================== [Littleton, MA, USA ]
COMPUTERWORLD 1 April
CREATORS ADMIT Unix, C HOAX
In an announcement that has stunned the computer industry, Ken Thompson,
Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan admitted that the Unix operating
system and C programming language created by them is an elaborate April
Fools prank kept alive for over 20 years. Speaking at the recent
UnixWorld Software Development Forum, Thompson revealed the following:
“In 1969, AT&&T had just terminated their work with the
GE/Honeywell/AT&&T Multics project. Brian and I had just started
working with an early release of Pascal from Professor Nichlaus Wirth’s ETH
labs in Switzerland and we were impressed with its elegant simplicity and
power. Dennis had just finished reading ‘Bored of the Rings’, a
hilarious National Lampoon parody of the great Tolkien ‘Lord of the
Rings’ trilogy. As a lark, we decided to do parodies of the Multics
environment and Pascal. Dennis and I were responsible for the operating
environment. We looked at Multics and designed the new system to be as
complex and cryptic as possible to maximize casual users’ frustration
levels, calling it Unix as a parody of Multics, as well as other more
risque allusions. Then Dennis and Brian worked on a truly warped
version of Pascal, called ‘A’. When we found others were actually
trying to create real programs with A, we quickly added additional
cryptic features and evolved into B, BCPL and finally C. We stopped
when we got a clean compile on the following syntax:
for(;P(”\n”),R—;P(”|”))for(e=C;e—;P(”_”+(*u++/8)%2))P(”| “+(*u/4)%2);
To think that modern programmers would try to use a language that
allowed such a statement was beyond our comprehension! We actually
thought of selling this to the Soviets to set their computer science
progress back 20 or more years. Imagine our surprise when AT&&T and
other US corporations actually began trying to use Unix and C! It has
taken them 20 years to develop enough expertise to generate even
marginally useful applications using this 1960’s technological parody,
but we are impressed with the tenacity (if not common sense) of the
general Unix and C programmer. In any event, Brian, Dennis and I have
been working exclusively in Pascal on the Apple Macintosh for the past
few years and feel really guilty about the chaos, confusion and truly
bad programming that have resulted from our silly prank so long ago.”
Major Unix and C vendors and customers, including AT&&T, Microsoft,
Hewlett-Packard, GTE, NCR, and DEC have refused comment at this time.
Borland International, a leading vendor of Pascal and C tools,
including the popular Turbo Pascal, Turbo C and Turbo C++, stated they
had suspected this for a number of years and would continue to enhance
their Pascal products and halt further efforts to develop C. An IBM
spokesman broke into uncontrolled laughter and had to postpone a
hastily convened news conference concerning the fate of the RS-6000,
merely stating ‘VM will be available Real Soon Now’. In a cryptic
statement, Professor Wirth of the ETH institute and father of the
Pascal, Modula 2 and Oberon structured languages, merely stated that P.
T. Barnum was correct.
In a related late-breaking story, usually reliable sources are stating
that a similar confession may be forthcoming from William Gates
concerning the MS-DOS and Windows operating environments. And IBM
spokesman have begun denying that the Virtual Machine (VM) product is
an internal prank gone awry.
{COMPUTERWORLD 1 April}
{contributed by Bernard L. Hayes}
I remember writing a sprite program in basic for Commodore 64.
I still have it and a load of old games and educational floppies.
It still works. It lives in my obsolete technology museum.
(AKA my electronics shop out back. Next to the reloading shed.)
That's the only kind! :)
I am learning it now by hacking Atari games....can't get any more 1982 than that!
Wasn’t LISP a bit like a forbidden pleasure? I haven’t used it in 25 years, but I still think of it fondly.
It was so long ago (45 years), I had forgotten that detail.
Yes but not for me!
Hmmmm. OK. Thanks.
yeah I wouldn’t want to maintain any of the sample code as I worked through some of the j examples. However after getting back into Linear Algebra and Applied Maths I know what he was trying to do and why. As I try to build more complicated distributed real time systems,(the robot army) the direct connection between the applied math and modern control modeling techniques becomes more attractive. The learning curve is incredibly intense to make things so basic. Haskell has made a nice attempt of bridging the pattern (math) / software impedance mismatch but who the heck is going to use that (I find lots of financial predictive analytics libs/apps with it). Maybe this Rust will pull it all together but in the mean time I’m finding C++ way nicer than I remember it and oh so much better than any of that php,perl,ruby,python, crap that we’ve had to sling during the obama years. Its the cloud everythings or embedded (who doesn’t use os neutral libraries if they can) the same architecture everywhere - compiled compiled compiled. Type safety to important to my sleep to give up. - What version of python does this script run on - 2.7 - of course
You should get sick again - its fun as an adult, ability to program, the internet with all the videos, and your experience as an adult(making/losing money investing, slamming on the brakes in your car) All those weird pattern things your subconscious tells you some underlying pattern become accessible and as an adult you have a chance of having some perspective to understand why and the wisdom to know what to do with it.
Man an FFT in lisp is cool and would be easy to use as an adaptive filter bank to use to experiment with. Good times to be had!
I preferred PROLOG!
Anyway when I need to program something I use MATLAB, occasionally Mathematica.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.