State of New Jersey needs COBOL programmers

At 18:25 05-04-20, you wrote: Thanks for that link. Didn't run into Dijkstra's work until I'd been programming for years but can't say he had much impact on me. Tried to find out tonight whether I had been "mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration". Found first computer book I bought on 21/1/1968 which was Digital Computer Principle by Burrough's Corporation when I would have been 14. In bad shape now as I'd lug it with me to reread sections wherever I went. Remembered entering a science fair that year with a full-adder circuit composed of DTL logic using discrete diodes and transistors. One of the people I met at that science fair and I got to play with a Nova computer shortly afterwards. It ran BASIC and we wondered why they let 2 14 year olds spend so much time writing little programs on it, but maybe they were using us an example of how easy it was for even kids to use. It was at some oil company related equipment exhibition in Calgary. After deciding it would be a lot faster to actually figure out how to get access to a computer than build my own, teamed up with a few nerds in Calgary. One of them had somehow pursuaded the Calgary school board to buy $20,000 worth of computer time on the UofC mainframe (200 CPU hours on a 360) and most of this CPU time was used by about 5 of us. I was thinking of mathematics at that point in my life, but was told that I would never be a mathematician when I talked to one of the UofC mathematicians about my program to numerically simulate the gravitational 3 body problem by solving the system of differential equations in FORTRAN. He was very dismissive saying that I was doing applied mathematics and my interests would be better suited to engineering. The guy I met at the science fair did go into engineering and did a lot of work on remote sensing and satellite imagery analysis. Program was easy, plotting results on graph paper wasn't. While hanging out at the UofC data center was told to read Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming which had just come out. Had no access to a MIX interpreter then and had to translate his algorithms into FORTRAN. Don't feel like going into my freezing shop attic now to find out whether I started with BASIC or FORTRAN, but it was probably Knuth that made me always like to code in assembly language. For the type of research I ended up doing, FORTRAN was far too slow and most of my PDP-11 programs were FORTRAN calls to assembly routines that were optimized for speed and bits of FORTRAN code I needed to display results or change experimental parameters. Got to work with a great mathematician during this research who was the black sheep in the UBC math faculty because his interest was applied mathematics. So if BASIC was first language I ever programmed in, didn't seem to affect my ability to create massive PDP-11 projects running on multiple processors simultaneously.