I unfortunately entered the field unschooled and without any sheepskins in a from the frying pan to the fire conditions at a place where I worked. With no education, training or experience I became 1st a coordinator, then a manager and eventually a director of a small IT staff of mostly programmers and beginning with almost all consultant-programmers to eventually a staff split pretty even between employees and programmers.
It was a small staff with a huge job with a boss, my boss, the CEO a believer that no one outside of our organization had invented or ever would invent the software and applications we needed, so everything was built in-house. But some consultants early on really screwed up,kept messing up, and we needed some things fixed quickly.
I have the ability to learn just about anything new to me, quickly. When the fires - problems, stalled projects, mainframe down, network down, major system changes, wholesale new systems - I had to step up where ever I was short, and became a better programmer in all our programming languages than just about everyone that worked for me - to get the job done.
In some ways, being in management, I lost my calling, but it through me into more programming areas than I could afford any of my staff to get into, in order to keep them on the timelines of what I needed them for. Everyone I hired later told me they were kind of afraid to work for me - I knew too much, they couldn’t screw up, I’d know it even if no one else did. One of my best consultants was offered to go work for an outfit working on an artificial intelligence project. He told me what it was and what they offered. I told him he’d be crazy not to take the offer. He decided he’d rather work with me. I never felt more blessed on the job.
So I never built any programming language, but I learned a lot of them, from Fortran and Assembler to Cobol and CICS, to C, to all the languages grown up around the Internet and PC-Network based client-server computing. (Taught myself HTML in one week)
But the whole field of people that created the field I worked in, at the applied level, has always made me feel I worked on the shoulders of giants. I would have liked to have been among them, but never was.
When we started, we didn’t need CS degrees. They trained us for just what they needed. It was that second computer language that was so hard to learn. Everything in the first one was written on stone tablets. For the second we were forced to generalize and that was HARD. But once we had the languages as concepts and not as stone tablets, we just looked for each concept in each new language. Voila!
And EVERYONE designed computer languages. As soon as anyone programmed, they saw the problems and felt they could do better. For DoD-I, every service was allowed to have 2 languages in addition to Ada. The Army only had one - TACPOL - because they couldn’t find any other computer language that was used on two projects. Oh, and the simulations. People lost the card decks and all they had was object code, so you couldn’t throw out the program so you bought a new computer that would simulate your old computer so you could run the old object code. And it happened over and over again, with everything slowing down as the stack of simulations grew.
I keep thinking that we shouldn’t worry at all about how the future makes use of our memories. We just need to push out all the notes and designs and whatever that we did and let the data diggers of the future figure out how to make use of it.