4 Apr
2020
4 Apr
'20
11:06 p.m.
https://josephsteinberg.com/covid-19-response-new-jersey-urgently-needs-cob…
--
=========================================
Jeff Brace
Vice President & Board Member, VCF East Showrunner
Vintage Computer Federation
http://www.vcfed.org/
jeffrey at vcfed.org
4 Apr
4 Apr
11:22 p.m.
I seem to recall they were using a lot of pdp11's, so oddly enough my
Cobol81 skills might be handy here.... I could even work remotely on my
pdp11/73 and hook up to them with DecNet....
Hm
On 4/4/2020 11:06 PM, Jeffrey Brace via cctalk wrote:
5 Apr
5 Apr
12:47 a.m.
On Sat, 4 Apr 2020, Jeffrey Brace via cctalk wrote:
In December 1999, they were looking for COBOL programmers.
They were told to update their software.
Now, 20 years later, they are looking for COBOL programmers, to start the
update project.
In another 16 years, they will need to send John Titor back in time to
look for a 5100. Maybe by then, they will realize that the 5100 was not
the only machine that could run APL.
I will repeat my standing offer. In exchange for a ONE-WAY ride to the
1960s, I will get him a 5100, and start an investment portfolio to fund
the project. I will now sweeten the deal, and promise to also do COBOL
for New Jersey for a few years in the 1990s, to try to help make Y2K less
of a surprise for them, and try to get them started updating their
software.
If the ride is ROUND-TRIP, then he just gets some documentation for the
5100.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com
12:54 a.m.
On 4/4/20 9:47 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
On Sat, 4 Apr 2020, Jeffrey Brace via cctalk wrote:
In December 1999, they were looking for COBOL programmers.
To be fair, in 1999, everybody under the sun was looking for COBOL
programmers.
--Chuck
1:15 a.m.
On Sat, 4 Apr 2020, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
VERY TRUE.
New Jersey is and was far from unique. They are like every other similar
installation. We never fix things until we get desperate.
What percentage of managers INTEND to update their legacy code base?
In 1970, in my absolutely bottom of the totem pole job at Goddard Space
Flight Center, I questioned the use of 2 decimal digits for the year.
(FORTRAN) I was told, "don't be ridiculous. All of this will be redone
long before that, and WE won't be here to be held responsible".
That was also when I learned to write comments before writing code, since
they damn sure wouldn't tolerate taking time to add comments after the
program seemed to work.
The entire industry was "taken by surprise" when it came time to deal with
Y2K.
Not just the computer industry. I re-ordered check blanks from my bank in
late 1998. They came with "19______" preprinted for date.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com
On Sat, 4 Apr
2020, Jeffrey Brace via cctalk wrote:
On 4/4/20 9:47 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
In December 1999, they were looking for COBOL
programmers.
To be fair, in 1999, everybody under the sun was looking for COBOL
programmers.
--Chuck
1:47 a.m.
On 4/4/20 10:15 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
In 1970, in my absolutely bottom of the totem pole job
at Goddard Space
Flight Center, I questioned the use of 2 decimal digits for the year.
(FORTRAN)? I was told, "don't be ridiculous.? All of this will be redone
long before that, and WE won't be here to be held responsible".
That was also when I learned to write comments before writing code,
since they damn sure wouldn't tolerate taking time to add comments after
the program seemed to work.
Heck, up until about 1975, the Air Force Logistics command was using IBM
7080s running COBOL with (undocumented) Autocoder patch decks.
Maintenance became an issue of "don't touch it if it works".
AFLC eventually updated their systems--to S/370 boxes running in 7080
emulation mode.
Stories like this abound. Wasn't California DMV running RCA Spectrolas
well into the 80s?
--Chuck
7:39 p.m.
On 4/5/2020 12:47 AM, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
On 4/4/20 10:15 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
Stories like this abound. Wasn't California DMV running RCA Spectrolas
well into the 80s?
--Chuck
I kind of doubt that, unless they had a version of IBM's IMS for it --
which I find unlikely, though I suppose maybe they had some of those
along side real (or compatible) IBM hardware.
I worked for Wisconsin DOT from 1975 until 2012. Just before I got
there, they had completed their own quite competent DMBS, which was
written (in assembler) because IBM's IMS was too inefficient and ADABAS
was too expensive. (That DBMS was still running some production when I
left, in parallel with DB2 but has since been retired.)
They learned IMS had issues when they talked with California, who told
them that at any one time a substantial part of their (either Drivers or
Motor Vehicle) database was offline at ANY time because it needed
reorganization.
I did write some COBOL on the IBM 1410 which I worked on while I was a
student (COBOL for which was surprisingly capable), DOS/VS, OS/360, MVS,
and so on. I found it to be:
- Very cumbersome and visually inefficient
- Error prone
- Harder than heck to read
So, mildly better than Assembler, but I'll take C and its descendents
over COBOL any day for anything. Indeed I was responsible for
introducing C into our organization in the 1980's -- I was exposed to
it, and UNIX just about the same time I went to work for WisDOT.
JRJ
7:56 p.m.
On 4/5/20 4:39 PM, Jay Jaeger via cctalk wrote:
On 4/5/2020 12:47 AM, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
I got my Computer Science degree in '86 and most of the programming for
my classwork was in C and ran on BSD UNIX on a 11/750. I also worked in
the school's computer center on a DECsystem-20.
My first job out of school was doing system software at Burroughs. The
stuff that I was working on initially ran on all three lines of
Burroughs mainframes sold at the time and, at Burroughs then, that meant
it was written in COBOL. So, my first week at Burroughs was spent
learning COBOL.
At school, everyone said that COBOL was evil. But after I had worked
with it for a while, though I thought it was verbose, I didn't find it
that bad to work with.
alan
On 4/4/20 10:15 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
Stories like this abound. Wasn't California DMV running RCA Spectrolas
well into the 80s?
--Chuck
I did write some COBOL on the IBM 1410 which I worked on while I was a
student (COBOL for which was surprisingly capable), DOS/VS, OS/360, MVS,
and so on. I found it to be: 
10:29 a.m.
On 4/5/20 12:54 AM, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
On 4/4/20 9:47 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
Not really. The Y2K problem had been addressed and fixed on all
the real computer systems long before that.
PRIMOS 23.4.Y2K.R1
------------------
Copyright (c) Prime Computer, Inc. 1988
A Y2K version of the OS released in 1988.
bill
On Sat, 4 Apr 2020, Jeffrey Brace via cctalk
wrote:
In December 1999, they were looking for COBOL programmers.
To be fair, in 1999, everybody under the sun was looking for COBOL
programmers.
11:26 a.m.
Yeah, my contract to a large University fixing all their COBOL stuff
finished in October 1998.
On Sun, 5 Apr 2020 at 16:29, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
On 4/5/20 12:54 AM, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
In December 1999, they were looking for COBOL programmers.
To be fair, in 1999, everybody under the sun was looking for COBOL
programmers.
Not really. The Y2K problem had been addressed and fixed on all
the real computer systems long before that.
PRIMOS 23.4.Y2K.R1
------------------
Copyright (c) Prime Computer, Inc. 1988
A Y2K version of the OS released in 1988.
bill
On 4/4/20 9:47 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
> On Sat, 4 Apr 2020, Jeffrey Brace via cctalk wrote:
>>
https://josephsteinberg.com/covid-19-response-new-jersey-urgently-needs-cob…
2:04 p.m.
Not sure about that. I worked for Pershing in Jersey City around that time. They were
(are?) a clearing house for tens of millions of dollars' worth of stock and bond
trades every day. Lots of cobol to be remediated still in 1999. Oh, and I also worked on
decimalization (stocks used to be traded in 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, and 1/16ths of a dollar)
-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk <cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org> On Behalf Of Bill Gunshannon via
cctalk
Sent: Sunday, April 5, 2020 10:29 AM
To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
Subject: Re: State of New Jersey needs COBOL programmers
On 4/5/20 12:54 AM, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
On 4/4/20 9:47 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
Not really. The Y2K problem had been addressed and fixed on all the real computer systems
long before that.
PRIMOS 23.4.Y2K.R1
------------------
Copyright (c) Prime Computer, Inc. 1988
A Y2K version of the OS released in 1988.
bill
On Sat, 4 Apr 2020, Jeffrey Brace via cctalk
wrote:
To be fair, in 1999, everybody under the sun was looking for COBOL
programmers.
https://josephsteinberg.com/covid-19-response-new-jersey-urgently-ne
eds-cobol-programmers-yes-you-read-that-correctly/
In December 1999, they were looking for COBOL programmers.
1:55 p.m.
On 4/4/2020 10:54 PM, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
On 4/4/20 9:47 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
Do they wear trench coats and dark glasses that nobody sees them,
and on the side they sell cheap watches from Hong Kong?
What about FORTRAN and PL/I?
On Sat, 4 Apr 2020, Jeffrey Brace via cctalk
wrote:
In December 1999, they were looking for COBOL programmers.
To be fair, in 1999, everybody under the sun was looking for COBOL
programmers.
--Chuck
9:41 a.m.
l?r 2020-04-04 klockan 21:47 -0700 skrev Fred Cisin via cctalk:
On Sat, 4 Apr 2020, Jeffrey Brace via cctalk wrote:
https://josephsteinberg.com/covid-19-response-new-jersey-urgently-needs-cob…
In December 1999, they were looking for COBOL programmers.
They were told to update their software.
Now, 20 years later, they are looking for COBOL programmers, to start
the
update project.
To be fair, in this case updating your software means:
throw out the baby with the water
build a completely new IT infrastructure with everything
and expect things to work badly the next 5-8 years....
long enough to hinder/(be a millstone around) the governor's re-
election campagin
and then in 15 years, be prepared to redo....
Pundits like this steinberg is right and wrong - they doesn't
acknowledge how expensive new fangled information technology is.
10 a.m.
This may have already been said, but I have worked with a little COBOL
within MS .NET for fun, some years ago, just to see it run. I am sure
that's what they're intending the candidates for this job will have had
experience doing. My guess would be it's just as important to be a .NET
guru who can update COBOL within that environment as if it was C# or ASP.
COBOL/.NET. You would need to assign printers, add option codes, etc..
You would be working with legacy code that is solid, just needs parameter
updates stuff like that. Networking, printer configurations and
environment tweaks.
When I ran COBOL GAP accounting jobs way back when while at DuPont, we used
TSO/JCL to set up the jobs. Now a day .NET fulfils that layer.
I guess it is possible that an AIX server emulating an early 80's IBM
server emulating an IBM 360 is the environment is being used but I bet it
was upgraded to .NET years ago. Not so crazy. COBOL is great for things
like printing checks.
So if you're a .NET guru this might be a fun contract in the $200/hr's.
Hmmm...
Bill
On Sun, Apr 5, 2020, 9:41 AM Stefan Skoglund via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
l?r 2020-04-04 klockan 21:47 -0700 skrev Fred Cisin
via cctalk:
On Sat, 4 Apr 2020, Jeffrey Brace via cctalk
wrote:
https://josephsteinberg.com/covid-19-response-new-jersey-urgently-needs-cob…
In December 1999, they were looking for COBOL programmers.
They were told to update their software.
Now, 20 years later, they are looking for COBOL programmers, to start
the
update project.
To be fair, in this case updating your software means:
throw out the baby with the water
build a completely new IT infrastructure with everything
and expect things to work badly the next 5-8 years....
long enough to hinder/(be a millstone around) the governor's re-
election campagin
and then in 15 years, be prepared to redo....
Pundits like this steinberg is right and wrong - they doesn't
acknowledge how expensive new fangled information technology is.
12:22 p.m.
On Apr 5, 2020, at 6:41 AM, Stefan Skoglund via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
l?r 2020-04-04 klockan 21:47 -0700 skrev Fred Cisin via cctalk:
What?s really funny, in a sad way, if you read the article above carefully, and you watch
the clip. They?re looking for *VOLUNTEERS* to do this work!
https://www.latestly.com/technology/new-jersey-governor-needs-cobol-program…
Zane
On Sat, 4 Apr 2020, Jeffrey Brace via cctalk
wrote:
https://josephsteinberg.com/covid-19-response-new-jersey-urgently-needs-cob…
In December 1999, they were looking for COBOL programmers.
They were told to update their software.
Now, 20 years later, they are looking for COBOL programmers, to start
the
update project.
To be fair, in this case updating your software means:
throw out the baby with the water
build a completely new IT infrastructure with everything
and expect things to work badly the next 5-8 years....
long enough to hinder/(be a millstone around) the governor's re-
election campagin
and then in 15 years, be prepared to redo....
Pundits like this steinberg is right and wrong - they doesn't
acknowledge how expensive new fangled information technology is. 
12:26 p.m.
On Sun, Apr 5, 2020, 10:22 AM Zane Healy via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
wrote:
What?s really funny, in a sad way, if you read the article above
carefully, and you watch the clip. They?re looking for *VOLUNTEERS* to do
this work!
https://www.latestly.com/technology/new-jersey-governor-needs-cobol-program…
Good luck with that. You could have found them easily enough in the 70s
when my folks were taking Cobol classes at the community college and
everyone was using it. Now... woof.
Warner
On Apr 5, 2020, at 6:41 AM, Stefan Skoglund via
cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
l?r 2020-04-04 klockan 21:47 -0700 skrev Fred Cisin via cctalk:
> On Sat, 4 Apr 2020, Jeffrey Brace via cctalk wrote:
>>
>
https://josephsteinberg.com/covid-19-response-new-jersey-urgently-needs-cob…
In December 1999, they were looking for COBOL programmers.
They were told to update their software.
Now, 20 years later, they are looking for COBOL programmers, to start
the
update project.
To be fair, in this case updating your software means:
throw out the baby with the water
build a completely new IT infrastructure with everything
and expect things to work badly the next 5-8 years....
long enough to hinder/(be a millstone around) the governor's re-
election campagin
and then in 15 years, be prepared to redo....
Pundits like this steinberg is right and wrong - they doesn't
acknowledge how expensive new fangled information technology is.
12:29 p.m.
On Sun, Apr 5, 2020, 10:26 AM Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:
On Sun, Apr 5, 2020, 10:22 AM Zane Healy via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org wrote:
What?s really funny, in a sad way, if you read the article above
carefully, and you watch the clip. They?re looking for *VOLUNTEERS* to do
this work!
https://www.latestly.com/technology/new-jersey-governor-needs-cobol-program…
Good luck with that. You could have found them easily enough in the 70s
when my folks were taking Cobol classes at the community college and
everyone was using it. Now... woof.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/04/05/new_jersey_seeks_cobol_volunteers/
Warner
On Apr 5, 2020, at 6:41 AM, Stefan Skoglund via
cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
l?r 2020-04-04 klockan 21:47 -0700 skrev Fred Cisin via cctalk:
> On Sat, 4 Apr 2020, Jeffrey Brace via cctalk wrote:
> >
https://josephsteinberg.com/covid-19-response-new-jersey-urgently-needs-cob…
In December 1999, they were looking for COBOL programmers.
They were told to update their software.
Now, 20 years later, they are looking for COBOL programmers, to start
the
update project.
To be fair, in this case updating your software means:
throw out the baby with the water
build a completely new IT infrastructure with everything
and expect things to work badly the next 5-8 years....
long enough to hinder/(be a millstone around) the governor's re-
election campagin
and then in 15 years, be prepared to redo....
Pundits like this steinberg is right and wrong - they doesn't
acknowledge how expensive new fangled information technology is.
3:40 p.m.
On Sun, 5 Apr 2020, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote:
Yet another article loaded with BS denigrating COBOL.
The product of a very flawed academic system that decided
to destroy COBOL because its users refused to accept that
academics know what's best for the industry.
On Sun, 5 Apr 2020, Warner Losh
via cctalk wrote:
Good luck with that. You could have found them easily
enough in the 70s
when my folks were taking Cobol classes at the community college and
everyone was using it. Now... woof.
Edsger Dijksta said, "The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching
should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense."
GUILTY as charged.
I only taught it (in community college), one semester in the mid 1980s,
when our regular colleague was on sabbatical (Jack Olson, who wrote the
book, along with Wil Price, our department chair),
https://www.amazon.com/Elements-Structured-Cobol-Programming-Wilson/dp/0030…
It was a good class, and I don't think that I botched it too badly.
For some types of programming, (not MY favorite types of prograamming),
COBOL is the right choice. I hope that they don't try to rewrite that
project in C, which is otherwise MY language of choice.
VOLUNTEERS??!? He could have at least offered to pay in TP.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com
3:53 p.m.
On Sun, 5 Apr 2020, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
Edsger Dijksta said, "The use of COBOL cripples
the mind; its teaching
should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense."
I'm pretty sure he said that about BASIC, and I'm totally bummed he died
before I could bitch slap him over it. ;)
g.
--
Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007
http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind.
http://www.diy-cockpits.org/coll - Go Collimated or Go Home.
Some people collect things for a hobby. Geeks collect hobbies.
ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment
A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes.
http://scarlet.deltasoft.com - Get it _today_!
3:56 p.m.
There were a lot of differing opinions, some of which held out over
time. Even Fred Brooks had to admit that David Parnas was right about
data encapsulation
On 05/04/2020 15:53, geneb via cctalk wrote:
On Sun, 5 Apr 2020, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
--
Nigel Johnson
MSc., MIEEE, MCSE
VE3ID/G4AJQ/VA3MCU
Amateur Radio, the origin of the open-source concept!
You can reach me by voice on Skype: TILBURY2591
If time travel ever will be possible, it already is. Ask me again yesterday
This e-mail is not and cannot, by its nature, be confidential. En route from me to you, it
will pass across the public Internet, easily readable by any number of system
administrators along the way.
Nigel Johnson <nw.johnson at ieee.org>
Please consider the environment when deciding if you really need to print this message
Edsger Dijksta said, "The use of COBOL
cripples the mind; its
teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense."
I'm pretty sure he said that about BASIC, and I'm totally bummed he
died before I could bitch slap him over it. ;)
g.
4:20 p.m.
> Edsger Dijksta said, "The use of COBOL
cripples the mind; its teaching
> should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense."
On Sun, 5 Apr 2020, geneb wrote:
I'm pretty sure he said that about BASIC, and
I'm totally bummed he died
before I could bitch slap him over it. ;)
well, close.
His BASIC quote is:
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that
have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are
mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
Here is one copy of his 1975 paper, "How Do We Tell Truths That Might
Hurt":
https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/ewd498.html
I don't know what language(s), if any, that he liked.
4:37 p.m.
On Sun, 5 Apr 2020, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
On Sun, 5 Apr 2020, geneb wrote:
That doesn't explain the millions of kids that got their start in BASIC
and grew up to learn skills that could wipe the floor with him...
I'm pretty sure he said that about BASIC, and
I'm totally bummed he died
before I could bitch slap him over it. ;)
well, close.
His BASIC quote is:
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have
had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally
mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
Here is one copy of his 1975 paper, "How Do We
Tell Truths That Might Hurt":
https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/ewd498.html
The problem is that it's not a "truth", it's horseshit, plain and
simple.
People that think so much of themselves that they consider their opinions
to have the weight of fact just make me froth at the mouth. :)
I don't know what language(s), if any, that he
liked.
Then he should have sat down, shut up, and let the adults talk. ;)
g.
--
Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007
http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind.
http://www.diy-cockpits.org/coll - Go Collimated or Go Home.
Some people collect things for a hobby. Geeks collect hobbies.
ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment
A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes.
http://scarlet.deltasoft.com - Get it _today_!
4:53 p.m.
Great Fortran, APL and COBOL my main languages, with a sprinkling of DCL.
----- Original Message -----
From: "General Discussion, On-Topic and Off-Topic
Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
To: "Fred Cisin" <cisin at xenosoft.com>, "General Discussion,
On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Sunday, April 5, 2020 4:37:11 PM
Subject: Re: State of New Jersey needs COBOL programmers
On Sun, 5 Apr 2020, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
On Sun, 5 Apr 2020, geneb wrote:
That doesn't explain the millions of kids that got their start in BASIC
and grew up to learn skills that could wipe the floor with him...
I'm pretty sure he said that about BASIC, and
I'm totally bummed he died
before I could bitch slap him over it. ;)
well, close.
His BASIC quote is:
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have
had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally
mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
Here is one copy of his 1975 paper, "How Do
We Tell Truths That Might Hurt":
https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/ewd498.html
The problem is that it's not a "truth", it's horseshit, plain and
simple.
People that think so much of themselves that they consider their opinions
to have the weight of fact just make me froth at the mouth. :)
I don't know what language(s), if any, that
he liked.
Then he should have sat down, shut up, and let the adults talk. ;)
g.
--
Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007
http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind.
http://www.diy-cockpits.org/coll - Go Collimated or Go Home.
Some people collect things for a hobby. Geeks collect hobbies.
ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment
A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes.
http://scarlet.deltasoft.com - Get it _today_! 
5:02 p.m.
I'm reminded of a T-shirt company that was around when I was in college, named
"Outer products". They had various math and physics related shirts, for example
with Maxwell's equations (your choice of differential or integral form). Also one
with the first 4 lines of the Odyssey.
For computer geeks they had quite a bunch, including this particularly cryptic one for
COBOL programmers
(.)(.)
IKF4084I
paul
6:05 p.m.
On Sun, 5 Apr 2020 at 23:02, Paul Koning via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
I'm reminded of a T-shirt company that was around when I was in college, named
"Outer products". They had various math and physics related shirts, for example
with Maxwell's equations (your choice of differential or integral form). Also one
with the first 4 lines of the Odyssey.
For computer geeks they had quite a bunch, including this particularly cryptic one for
COBOL programmers
(.)(.)
IKF4084I
ILLOGICAL USE OF PARENTHESES OR RELATIONALS
ACCEPTED WITH DOUBTS AS TO MEANING.
...?
The T-shirts are still out there, I am amused to see.
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: lproven at gmail.com
Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven ? Skype: liamproven
UK: +44 7939-087884 ? ?R (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
7:55 p.m.
On 4/5/2020 4:02 PM, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote:
I'm reminded of a T-shirt company that was around
when I was in college, named "Outer products". They had various math and
physics related shirts, for example with Maxwell's equations (your choice of
differential or integral form). Also one with the first 4 lines of the Odyssey.
For computer geeks they had quite a bunch, including this particularly cryptic one for
COBOL programmers
(.)(.)
IKF4084I
paul
https://www.zazzle.com/ikf4084i_c_t_shirt-235922162936523884
--
Jim Brain
brain at jbrain.com
www.jbrain.com
5:27 p.m.
I'm convinced that Dijksta (and anyone else who came out with similar
comments were full of horseshit. In my opinion, it's the ability to
translate a real world "thing" into an algorithm that is the essense of
programming, and anyone who has managed to learn (particularly on their
own, as many of us did) that ability has learned something that transcends
the language (or tool) you use to implement the algorithm. When I first
started programming professionally, we had "programmers" (or sometimes
designers) who specified the algorithms and "coders" who implemented them.
That never worked well
On Sun, 5 Apr 2020 at 22:37, geneb via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
On Sun, 5 Apr 2020, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
have
On Sun, 5 Apr 2020, geneb wrote:
> I'm pretty sure he said that about BASIC, and I'm totally bummed he
died
before I
could bitch slap him over it. ;)
well, close.
His BASIC quote is:
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential
programmers they are
mentally
mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
That doesn't explain the millions of kids that got their start in BASIC
and grew up to learn skills that could wipe the floor with him...
Here is one copy of his 1975 paper, "How Do
We Tell Truths That Might
Hurt":
The problem is that it's not a "truth", it's horseshit, plain and
simple.
People that think so much of themselves that they consider their opinions
to have the weight of fact just make me froth at the mouth. :)
I don't know what language(s), if any, that
he liked.
Then he should have sat down, shut up, and let the adults talk. ;)
g.
--
Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007
http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind.
http://www.diy-cockpits.org/coll - Go Collimated or Go Home.
Some people collect things for a hobby. Geeks collect hobbies.
ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment
A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes.
http://scarlet.deltasoft.com - Get it _today_!
6:05 p.m.
On 4/5/20 2:27 PM, Neil Thompson via cctalk wrote:
I'm convinced that Dijksta (and anyone else who
came out with similar
comments were full of horseshit. In my opinion, it's the ability to
translate a real world "thing" into an algorithm that is the essense of
programming, and anyone who has managed to learn (particularly on their
own, as many of us did) that ability has learned something that transcends
the language (or tool) you use to implement the algorithm. When I first
started programming professionally, we had "programmers" (or sometimes
designers) who specified the algorithms and "coders" who implemented them.
That never worked well
Well, IIRC< Dijkstra hated the IBM 1620 too, but lots of work was done
with it.
So, there are opinions and then there is reality. In that respect,
nothing's changed.
--Chuck
6:17 p.m.
On 05/04/2020 22:27, Neil Thompson via cctalk wrote:
I'm convinced that Dijksta (and anyone else who
came out with similar
comments were full of horseshit. In my opinion, it's the ability to
translate a real world "thing" into an algorithm that is the essense of
programming,
Dijkstra was a computer scientist not a computer programmer. The two are
only tangentially related!
I only ever managed to get to one of his guest lectures, which I found
to be very entertaining. I'm glad I was never one of his students :-)
Antonio
--
Antonio Carlini
antonio at acarlini.com
6:28 p.m.
On Sun, Apr 5, 2020 at 4:18 PM Antonio Carlini via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
Dijkstra was a computer scientist not a computer
programmer. The two are
only tangentially related!
It's funny that you say this because Dijkstra explictly calls himself
a programmer in his 1972 ACM Turing Award Lecture:
"I married, and Dutch marriage rites require you to state your
professionand I stated that i was a programmer."
7:33 p.m.
On April 5, 2020 at 5:28 PM Peter Schow via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
On Sun, Apr 5, 2020 at 4:18 PM Antonio Carlini via cctalk<cctalk at classiccmp.org>
wrote:> Dijkstra was a computer scientist not a computer programmer. The two areonly
tangentially related!It's funny that you say this because Dijkstra explictly calls
himselfa programmer in his 1972 ACM Turing Award Lecture:
"I married, and Dutch marriage rites require you to state yourprofessionand I stated
that i was a programmer."
He called himself a programmer in 1957, and even that description wasn't allowed. I
don't think the term "computer scientist" existed yet.
Another two years later, in 1957, I married and Dutch marriage rites require you to state
your profession and I stated that I was a programmer. But the municipal authorities of the
town of Amsterdam did not accept it on the grounds that there was no such profession. And,
believe it or not, but under the heading ?profession? my marriage act shows the ridiculous
entry ?theoretical physicist?!
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD340.html
Will
8:13 p.m.
On 4/5/20 6:28 PM, Peter Schow via cctalk wrote:
On Sun, Apr 5, 2020 at 4:18 PM Antonio Carlini via
cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
Claiming it doesn't necessarily make it so.
bill
Dijkstra was a computer scientist not a computer
programmer. The two are
only tangentially related!
It's funny that you say this because Dijkstra explictly calls himself
a programmer in his 1972 ACM Turing Award Lecture:
"I married, and Dutch marriage rites require you to state your
professionand I stated that i was a programmer."
6 Apr
6 Apr
9:42 a.m.
On Apr 5, 2020, at 6:17 PM, Antonio Carlini via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
On 05/04/2020 22:27, Neil Thompson via cctalk wrote:
That's clearly not true. He was hired as a programmer, the first in the country, by
the Mathematical Center. And he wrote a number of major programs: the first
implementation of the Shortest Path algorithm, the world's first ALGOL compiler, and
the THE operating system -- among others. Also the BIOS for the Electrologica X1
computer, which was the topic of his Ph.D. thesis.
It's true that later on he focused on computer science theory, but to claim that he
didn't know about programming shows a lack of understanding of his history.
BTW, the reason he didn't like the IBM 1620 is that you can't build a
multiprogramming OS on it since it has no interrupts and uses blocking I/O.
paul
I'm convinced that Dijksta (and anyone else
who came out with similar
comments were full of horseshit. In my opinion, it's the ability to
translate a real world "thing" into an algorithm that is the essense of
programming,
Dijkstra was a computer scientist not a computer programmer. The two are only
tangentially related!
5 Apr
5 Apr
6:28 p.m.
On Sun, 5 Apr 2020, Neil Thompson via cctalk wrote:
I'm convinced that Dijksta (and anyone else who
came out with similar
comments were full of horseshit. In my opinion, it's the ability to
translate a real world "thing" into an algorithm that is the essense of
programming, and anyone who has managed to learn (particularly on their
own, as many of us did) that ability has learned something that transcends
the language (or tool) you use to implement the algorithm. When I first
started programming professionally, we had "programmers" (or sometimes
designers) who specified the algorithms and "coders" who implemented them.
That never worked well
Yep. You can write horrible code in /any/ language. ;)
BTW, I scanned & uploaded this last week. Oddly relevant.
https://archive.org/details/cobolcodingform
g.
--
Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007
http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind.
http://www.diy-cockpits.org/coll - Go Collimated or Go Home.
Some people collect things for a hobby. Geeks collect hobbies.
ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment
A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes.
http://scarlet.deltasoft.com - Get it _today_!
8:12 p.m.
On 4/5/20 6:28 PM, geneb via cctalk wrote:
On Sun, 5 Apr 2020, Neil Thompson via cctalk wrote:
I still have lots of them. And Printer Output Forms. And Fortran
Programming Forms. And all kinds of other Programming forms. And
Flow Chart Forms. You know all that stuff we actually used to
engineer programs before the software engineers came along and said
we were all doing wrong.
bill
I'm convinced that Dijksta (and anyone else
who came out with similar
comments were full of horseshit.? In my opinion, it's the ability to
translate a real world "thing" into an algorithm that is the essense of
programming, and anyone who has managed to learn (particularly on their
own, as many of us did) that ability has learned something that
transcends
the language (or tool) you use to implement the algorithm.? When I first
started programming professionally, we had "programmers" (or sometimes
designers) who specified the algorithms and "coders" who implemented
them.
That never worked well
Yep.? You can write horrible code in /any/ language. ;)
BTW, I scanned & uploaded this last week.? Oddly relevant.
https://archive.org/details/cobolcodingform
8:40 p.m.
> well, close.
> His BASIC quote is:
> "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that
> have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are
> mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
> Here is one copy of his 1975 paper, "How Do We Tell Truths That Might
> Hurt":
> https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/ewd498.html
On Sun, 5 Apr 2020, geneb wrote:
That doesn't explain the millions of kids that got
their start in BASIC and
grew up to learn skills that could wipe the floor with him...
I still believe that the best FIRST exposure to computer programming
should be BASIC. VERY FIRST program should have instant gratification,
without having had to already learn underlying structures, variable
types, how to run a compiler, etc. After creating first program, and a
few more, in a very short time, it would then be sensible to evaluate
what kind of programming is most interesting, and switch to the most
appropriate language. Having already created a few token programs, it is
then less onerous to learn compilers, data types, system overhead,
"ENVIRONMENT DIVISION", etc.
Q: If Bill Gates hadn't written a BASIC interpreter, where would we be
now?
8:44 p.m.
On 2020-04-05 8:40 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
Sounds like you've never heard of Lisp.
> well,
close.
> His BASIC quote is:
> "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students
> that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers
> they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
> Here is one copy of his 1975 paper, "How Do We Tell Truths That Might
> Hurt":
> https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/ewd498.html
On Sun, 5 Apr 2020, geneb wrote:
That doesn't explain the millions of kids
that got their start in
BASIC and grew up to learn skills that could wipe the floor with him...
I still believe that the best FIRST exposure to computer programming
should be BASIC.? VERY FIRST program should have instant gratification,
without having had to already learn underlying structures, variable
types, how to run a compiler, etc.? After creating first program, and a
few more, in a very short time, it would then be sensible to evaluate
what kind of programming is most interesting, and switch to the most
appropriate language.? Having already created a few token programs, it
is then less onerous to learn compilers, data types, system overhead,
"ENVIRONMENT DIVISION", etc.
Q: If Bill Gates hadn't written a BASIC interpreter, where would we be now?
8:53 p.m.
> I still believe that the best FIRST exposure to
computer programming
> should be BASIC.? VERY FIRST program should have instant gratification,
> without having had to already learn underlying structures, variable
> types, how to run a compiler, etc.? After creating first program, and a
> few more, in a very short time, it would then be sensible to evaluate
> what kind of programming is most interesting, and switch to the most
> appropriate language.? Having already created a few token programs, it
> is then less onerous to learn compilers, data types, system overhead,
> "ENVIRONMENT DIVISION", etc.
On Sun, 5 Apr 2020, Toby Thain wrote:
Sounds like you've never heard of Lisp.
LISP is a reasonable alternative starter language.
I PREFER BASIC for beginners, because I have met a few that have
difficulty fully understanding parentheses, and BASIC is a trivial
transfer to FORTRAN and a few other languages in that group.
9:46 p.m.
On 4/5/2020 6:44 PM, Toby Thain via cctalk wrote:
All the old programmers speak with a LISP.
I view computer science ... teaching is what 'trending now' since
schools promote grinding out students, not teaching real world problems.
As for Gates, the right place at the right time, and having access to a
main frame.
Q: If Bill
Gates hadn't written a BASIC interpreter, where would we be now?
Sounds like you've never heard of Lisp.
10:54 p.m.
On 4/5/2020 8:46 PM, ben via cctalk wrote:
All the old programmers speak with a LISP.
I view computer science ... teaching is what 'trending now' since
schools promote grinding out students, not teaching real world problems.
As for Gates, the right place at the right time, and having access to a
main frame. Well, I'd have called the PDP-10 a minicomputer nonetheless, but
that's
just me. ;) Plus, he was essentially stealing campus resources for
personal aggrandizement. Its one thing to mess around learning stuff
outside of a course setting. Quite another to take that time, without
even asking, in order to turn a profit. Not a fan.
As for Lots of Insipid Stupid Parentheses - I can't see that as a
beginning language. For anyone. Of the many many (well over a hundred)
programmers I worked with outside of a university setting, less than a
handful had even *heard* of it.
<RANT>
As for teaching, there are multiple needs. One size doesn't fit all
institutions. One is plain old programming. That does get taught in
computer science at universities, but it really ought to be just a means
to an end: learning about how programs get written, how to compile them,
data structures, semaphores, and so on.
During my ECE & CS studies, aside from my student job, I got exposed to:
BASIC (1 day) and FORTRAN (both while still in HS), ALGOL (2
dialects), at least 4 different assemblers/machine languages, SNOBOL,
LISP, PLUS (Programming Language for UNIVAC Systems - their PL/S),
AMINOL (You won't find anything about that anywhere any more), PLUM
(Maryland's PL/I subset).
During my student jobs I picked up 1410 Autocoder, COBOL and a tiny bit
of System/370 Assembler.
I learned about data structures up the wazoo: linked lists, stacks,
activation records for block structure languages (3 times), and heaven
only knows what else, with exposure in many courses. Also
multitasking/multiprocessing and all that went with that in multiple
courses.
And performance measurement and management.
[FWIW, this was a time before PASCAL and databases]
I got exposed to soooo much stuff that picking up anything else later
was essentially trivial. So, when I got to a 360/65-MP and had to do
Assember and COBOL no biggy. When we had an Amdahl 470 that was fast
enough that poorly designed software had threading issues (as in an
idiot developer of a commercial product that expected to use MVS task
dispatching priority to avoid deadlocks), that was easy too. As was
teaching my co-workers how to use a stack structure to implement a
recursive algorithm without having to do recursive subroutine calls.
I was able to explain to the other system programmers what happened when
utilization of a resource gets to me more than about 80% (think disk
queue) and how fast things go to Hades in a handbasket. Queing theory
came in handier than heck when I was able to model the effect of
response time store and retrieve image documents and demonstrate to our
management and our vendor that we would have lines around the block -
the project got delayed a year as a result.
That is the kind of thing a Computer Science program ought to be doing.
Teaching advanced techniques and concepts that can be used in
situations folks haven't even discovered that show up 30 years hence.
These are things that MOST ordinary programmers are not likely to learn
or even need as long as they have access to that kind of expertise.
Some call it "ivory tower", but I hope my explanation has shown that
there is MUCH more to it than that.
(Of course, there are some who learn such stuff and can never apply it,
just as there are engineers that can't apply knowledge in that domain,
either. That isn't the fault of the university. That is the fault of
the student or whomever pushed the student into a situation they were
either not a good fit for, or were not sufficiently prepared for.)
BUT, outside of a 4 year degree environment, ah, that is an entirely
different story. THAT is where we should be teaching "real world
problems". Stuff that folks can use immediately to land, keep and
succeed at a job. How to do the things that developers encounter each
and every day. Current technology and practices and languages that
folks are actually using every day.
Think about it as an analog between carpentry and structural
engineering. When a carpenter really needs engineering help, they go to
an engineer (for example, as the contractor did to cantilever the deck
off the back of my house), but that doesn't mean that every carpenter
should have all the complex skills an engineer has, nor does it mean
that an engineer needs all of the skills a carpenter has - though of
course the engineer had better know practical and doable from crazy. ;)
Trouble arises when you try to teach EITHER ONE broadly/completely in
the other environment. The (MIX) assembler course I took focused WAY
too much on "niceties" and trying to squeeze out every last bit of
performance, instead of teaching conceptually how to wring bits from a
turnip. It was a horrible waste of time (and pretty much out of date
before it even started.)
There can be exceptions, of course. There is a place, for example, for
teaching non CS majors in a university setting Python (not my favorite)
because they may need it in their studies and research these days.
Sorta like teaching Calculus to broad numbers of student who are not
math majors.
I tried to teach my Linux OS students at a tech school a little bit
about how virtual memory worked so that when faced with real world
performance issues they might better cope rather than just rote numbers
- with mixed results at best, but hopefully some of it stuck. Same
thing with multi-processing and what could go wrong with programs and
systems in that Linux OS class. But I would never ever dream of
teaching them LISP -- wrong place for that.
</RANT>
JRJ
On 4/5/2020 6:44 PM, Toby Thain via cctalk wrote:
All the old programmers speak with a LISP.
I view computer science ... teaching is what 'trending now' since
schools promote grinding out students, not teaching real world problems.
As for Gates, the right place at the right time, and having access to a
main frame.
On 4/5/2020 8:46 PM, ben via cctalk wrote:> On 4/5/2020 6:44 PM, Toby
Thain via cctalk wrote:
Q: If
Bill Gates hadn't written a BASIC interpreter, where would we
be now?
Sounds like you've never heard of Lisp.
Q: If
Bill Gates hadn't written a BASIC interpreter, where would we
be now?
Sounds like you've never heard of Lisp.
6 Apr
6 Apr
5:27 a.m.
Speaking of COBOL and Admiral Grace Hopper, I have one of her actual
nanoseconds, a piece of insulated solid wire about 11.2 inches long, when
she was a Superintendent's guest lecturer. Since I was a Navy MSCS
student, she "signed" it with stripes and gaps in magic marker, as the ones
and zeroes in ASCII representing her name.
An enterprising headhunter scoured retirement communities in Florida,
Texas, Arizona, etc., in 1999, looking for COBOL programmers who knew where
the two-digit dates were in the code. In many cases, the source had been
lost by the 1990s, so they really had to know the code. AIUI, the Federal
Reserve and many banking systems still run COBOL executables that have been
wrapped to enable them to be run on modern OSes on current hardware, much
as FORTRAN executables run on NASA missions, such as the Mars orbiters,
landers, and rovers. Rewriting such code would introduce bugs galore,
especially anything contracted out by the government to the lowest bidder.
As for learning computing, I have a slightly different range of students
that are my charges than present company. It starts with kindergartners
and ends with adults of all ages in colleges and universities. OK, so what
the heck can a kindergartner possibly learn about computing? Notice that I
didn't say computer science, that's a subset of computing. Computing
encompasses mathematics, physics, science, engineering, hardware, software,
and all of the more specialized areas under each of those major
categories. Programming isn't even up toward the top, any more than
soldering is, although my students all learn some things that will be
useful throughout their lives, no matter where they wind up career-wise.
Here's what kindergartners can learn about computing: the concepts of
something and nothing, and that there is literally money in computers.
Huh? The little ones don't even see a one or a zero when I start them out
- we start with one of the most fundamental concepts in computing that even
some freshman CS students often don't comprehend, the difference between
something and nothing. I ask them to identify opposites that they can
sense, such as light and dark, a marble and an absence of a marble, left
and right hands, magnets that attract and magnets that repel, etc.
Eventually, we graduate to pennies: nice, shiny, brand-new-from-the-bank
pennies that, to a kindergartner, are actual gold. They play with the
pennies to discover that they can roll around, and learn that they're not
food or nasal suppositories, under careful supervision by multiple adults.
They also find out that there is another opposites concept: heads and
tails, which we acknowledge as what we educators call a scaffolding
element, upon which other concepts will be built later.
They're then provided egg cartons, which enables them to start learning the
concept of organization, which even many adults never get close to
mastering. After a while, the tykes are encouraged to toss the pennies
short distances and they learn that the pennies just happen to fit nicely
at the bottom of the egg-holding parts of the cartons. That's when I begin
repeating the mantra to them every day: "There's literally money in
computers. There's literally money in computers ... " When they start
repeating it at home, their parents/guardians thank me profusely when they
see me.
Now the magic begins - the kids are shown that patterns can be created with
shiny pennies and not-so-shiny empty holes. I collect egg cartons from
institutional kitchens that use real in-the-shell eggs, e.g. breakfast
places like IHOP, Denny's, etc., that serve eggs sunny-side-up/down. Very
few kitchens use real eggs any more unless they're serving dishes with
actual yolks and whites - omelettes, scrambled eggs, baked goods, etc., are
all made with powdered eggs or liquid egg mixtures, even at what you might
consider upscale restaurants. The cartons they use are upwards of
eight-by-eight eggs in size, which stack nicely for storage, as well as
rapid access to make lots of whole, fresh egg dishes.
You might be seeing where I'm going with the eight-by-eight cartons,
because they're ideal for representing arrays of bits as bytes, with rows
potentially representing successive memory locations, registers, graphics
buffers, etc. Of course, the kindergartners aren't going to understand
anything about those sorts of concepts, but by the time I do get to them,
they don't think twice about manipulating pennies in egg cartons.
In the higher grades, I teach them binary math after we map pennies to
ones and the egg holes to zeroes. They haven't learned decimal numbers and
math at that point, yet, so this is a terrific opportunity to get them
comfortable with bits without the confusion of seeing 10 and reflexively
reading it as ten - it's always pronounced "one zero".
At that point, they can learn the four rules for binary addition: 0 + 0 =
0, 0 + 1 = 1, 1 + 0 = 1, and 1 + 1 = 0 and carry 1 to the next digit to the
left. This is much simpler than learning decimal addition and prepares
students by scaffolding decimal math on top of binary math that they
learned as early as possible. Early on, I also ensure that the
something-nothing opposites concept of something and null are deeply
instilled
I use these techniques for students all the way up through elderly adults
to help them understand what's really going on in binary digital
computing. You would be surprised at how many supposedly computing-savvy
people have no idea that computing hardware almost universally executes
everything at the bit level, and that the air around them is filled with
exabits/second of serialized data via all sorts of frequencies and
modulations.
Extrapolate that sort of progression through all of the computing concepts
discussed in previous posts, and much more, using scaffolding all the way
up through the postgraduate computing level and you now have an idea of
where computing education is going. This is not your grandfather's,
father's, or even your own kind of educational experience, this is
something more befitting of the 21st Century, and it's not limited to just
computing.
Waiting until the post-secondary or even secondary educational levels to
teach computing is no longer an option, as we don't have the luxury of only
educating an elite few. We have to start as early as possible with
everyone and build layer upon layer alongside all of the other fundamentals
to establish a citizenry to whom computing fundamentals are as familiar as
the A-B-Cs and 1-2-3s, along with other important ideas and skills that
haven't been taught appropriately for going on 100-plus years.
6:34 a.m.
On Mon, 6 Apr 2020 at 11:28, Jim Manley via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
Speaking of COBOL and Admiral Grace Hopper, I have one of her actual
nanoseconds, a piece of insulated solid wire about 11.2 inches long, when
she was a Superintendent's guest lecturer. Since I was a Navy MSCS
student, she "signed" it with stripes and gaps in magic marker, as the ones
and zeroes in ASCII representing her name.
An enterprising headhunter scoured retirement communities in Florida,
Texas, Arizona, etc., in 1999, looking for COBOL programmers who knew where
the two-digit dates were in the code. In many cases, the source had been
lost by the 1990s, so they really had to know the code. AIUI, the Federal
Reserve and many banking systems still run COBOL executables that have been
wrapped to enable them to be run on modern OSes on current hardware, much
as FORTRAN executables run on NASA missions, such as the Mars orbiters,
landers, and rovers. Rewriting such code would introduce bugs galore,
especially anything contracted out by the government to the lowest bidder.
As for learning computing, I have a slightly different range of students
that are my charges than present company. It starts with kindergartners
and ends with adults of all ages in colleges and universities. OK, so what
the heck can a kindergartner possibly learn about computing? Notice that I
didn't say computer science, that's a subset of computing. Computing
encompasses mathematics, physics, science, engineering, hardware, software,
and all of the more specialized areas under each of those major
categories. Programming isn't even up toward the top, any more than
soldering is, although my students all learn some things that will be
useful throughout their lives, no matter where they wind up career-wise.
Here's what kindergartners can learn about computing: the concepts of
something and nothing, and that there is literally money in computers.
Huh? The little ones don't even see a one or a zero when I start them out
- we start with one of the most fundamental concepts in computing that even
some freshman CS students often don't comprehend, the difference between
something and nothing. I ask them to identify opposites that they can
sense, such as light and dark, a marble and an absence of a marble, left
and right hands, magnets that attract and magnets that repel, etc.
Eventually, we graduate to pennies: nice, shiny, brand-new-from-the-bank
pennies that, to a kindergartner, are actual gold. They play with the
pennies to discover that they can roll around, and learn that they're not
food or nasal suppositories, under careful supervision by multiple adults.
They also find out that there is another opposites concept: heads and
tails, which we acknowledge as what we educators call a scaffolding
element, upon which other concepts will be built later.
They're then provided egg cartons, which enables them to start learning the
concept of organization, which even many adults never get close to
mastering. After a while, the tykes are encouraged to toss the pennies
short distances and they learn that the pennies just happen to fit nicely
at the bottom of the egg-holding parts of the cartons. That's when I begin
repeating the mantra to them every day: "There's literally money in
computers. There's literally money in computers ... " When they start
repeating it at home, their parents/guardians thank me profusely when they
see me.
Now the magic begins - the kids are shown that patterns can be created with
shiny pennies and not-so-shiny empty holes. I collect egg cartons from
institutional kitchens that use real in-the-shell eggs, e.g. breakfast
places like IHOP, Denny's, etc., that serve eggs sunny-side-up/down. Very
few kitchens use real eggs any more unless they're serving dishes with
actual yolks and whites - omelettes, scrambled eggs, baked goods, etc., are
all made with powdered eggs or liquid egg mixtures, even at what you might
consider upscale restaurants. The cartons they use are upwards of
eight-by-eight eggs in size, which stack nicely for storage, as well as
rapid access to make lots of whole, fresh egg dishes.
You might be seeing where I'm going with the eight-by-eight cartons,
because they're ideal for representing arrays of bits as bytes, with rows
potentially representing successive memory locations, registers, graphics
buffers, etc. Of course, the kindergartners aren't going to understand
anything about those sorts of concepts, but by the time I do get to them,
they don't think twice about manipulating pennies in egg cartons.
In the higher grades, I teach them binary math after we map pennies to
ones and the egg holes to zeroes. They haven't learned decimal numbers and
math at that point, yet, so this is a terrific opportunity to get them
comfortable with bits without the confusion of seeing 10 and reflexively
reading it as ten - it's always pronounced "one zero".
At that point, they can learn the four rules for binary addition: 0 + 0 =
0, 0 + 1 = 1, 1 + 0 = 1, and 1 + 1 = 0 and carry 1 to the next digit to the
left. This is much simpler than learning decimal addition and prepares
students by scaffolding decimal math on top of binary math that they
learned as early as possible. Early on, I also ensure that the
something-nothing opposites concept of something and null are deeply
instilled
I use these techniques for students all the way up through elderly adults
to help them understand what's really going on in binary digital
computing. You would be surprised at how many supposedly computing-savvy
people have no idea that computing hardware almost universally executes
everything at the bit level, and that the air around them is filled with
exabits/second of serialized data via all sorts of frequencies and
modulations.
Extrapolate that sort of progression through all of the computing concepts
discussed in previous posts, and much more, using scaffolding all the way
up through the postgraduate computing level and you now have an idea of
where computing education is going. This is not your grandfather's,
father's, or even your own kind of educational experience, this is
something more befitting of the 21st Century, and it's not limited to just
computing.
Waiting until the post-secondary or even secondary educational levels to
teach computing is no longer an option, as we don't have the luxury of only
educating an elite few. We have to start as early as possible with
everyone and build layer upon layer alongside all of the other fundamentals
to establish a citizenry to whom computing fundamentals are as familiar as
the A-B-Cs and 1-2-3s, along with other important ideas and skills that
haven't been taught appropriately for going on 100-plus years.
What a wonderful post. Started out with me being a little envious of
meeting Admiral Hopper and having a nanosecond, and ended up with an
inspiring tale of teaching logic.
*Applause*
Thank you for that!
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: lproven at gmail.com
Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven ? Skype: liamproven
UK: +44 7939-087884 ? ?R (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
11:46 a.m.
On 4/6/20 2:27 AM, Jim Manley via cctalk wrote:
Speaking of COBOL and Admiral Grace Hopper, I have one
of her actual
nanoseconds, a piece of insulated solid wire about 11.2 inches long, when
she was a Superintendent's guest lecturer. Since I was a Navy MSCS
student, she "signed" it with stripes and gaps in magic marker, as the ones
and zeroes in ASCII representing her name.
Parenthetically, it should be mentioned that the US Navy played an
important part in COBOL certification. One standard requirement for
vendors back in the day wss passing the "Navy Audit Tests" (CCVS).
In particular, I remember that one could tell where one was in the test
suite by the sounds that the tape drives made when writing short records
of various lengths. It was LOUD, even with the tape drive door closed.
The "audit tests" were as much a test of the COBOL compiler as of the
operating system.
--Chuck
12:06 p.m.
On Mon, Apr 6, 2020 at 5:28 AM Jim Manley via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
Speaking of COBOL and Admiral Grace Hopper, I have one
of her actual
nanoseconds, a piece of insulated solid wire about 11.2 inches long, when
she was a Superintendent's guest lecturer. Since I was a Navy MSCS
student, she "signed" it with stripes and gaps in magic marker, as the ones
and zeroes in ASCII representing her name.
Very cool. I was supposed to get one of her nanoseconds as a
speaker's gift at a tech convention but they didn't get the packet in
time. Obviously one can make a reproduction but the actual artifact
would have been cool to receive.
As for learning computing, I have a slightly different
range of students
that are my charges than present company. It starts with kindergartners
and ends with adults of all ages in colleges and universities...
Definitely an interesting progression there. The tangible nature of
pennies in egg cups is quite useful for the younger learners.
I was in elementary school in the early 70s, on the tail end of the
New Math. We had Cuisenaire rods for learning about area and volume
(and powers of 10), and around second grade, we delved into alternate
number bases. We touched on Base-6 and Base-8 because that was in the
mathbooks, but our teacher put more emphasis on Base-2. We didn't
just treat them like plain numbers, we encoded letters (how many
7-year-olds can resist writing secret messages!) We did the obvious
at first, 5-bit groups with 00000 for space and 00001 for A, etc., and
found that long sequences were quite tedious to write (and more
tedious to read). We then came up with the idea (with prodding from
the teacher, no doubt) to substitute letters for sequences of 1s or
0s. T for 111, F for 000, for example. As I recall, we had subs for
5, 4, and 3 sequential identical binary digits (there being little
reward for subbing 2). With a dictionary of 8 symbols, we had
obfuscation with light compression.
I started programming BASIC on the PET about 4 years later. Learning
Boolean operators and bitmasks for I/O registers (to manipulate the
PET User Port) was easy after that earlier intro to Binary.
Definitely start the kids early on it.
You would be surprised at how many supposedly
computing-savvy
people have no idea that computing hardware almost universally executes
everything at the bit level, and that the air around them is filled with
exabits/second of serialized data via all sorts of frequencies and
modulations.
No doubt. I work with a lot of developers who have no idea how stuff
works below "Objects" (they instantiate an object, send it message and
magic happens - all black boxes connected with string).
-ethan
9:49 a.m.
On Sun, 5 Apr 2020, Fred Cisin wrote:
I still believe that the best FIRST exposure to
computer programming should
be BASIC. VERY FIRST program should have instant gratification, without
having had to already learn underlying structures, variable types, how to run
a compiler, etc. After creating first program, and a few more, in a very
short time, it would then be sensible to evaluate what kind of programming is
most interesting, and switch to the most appropriate language. Having
already created a few token programs, it is then less onerous to learn
compilers, data types, system overhead, "ENVIRONMENT DIVISION", etc.
A friend of mine started out with BDS C and never did get around to
learning BASIC...
Q: If Bill Gates hadn't written a BASIC interpreter, where would we be now?
I strongly suspect someone else would have come out with one. Tiny BASIC
may have happened earlier.
g.
--
Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007
http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind.
http://www.diy-cockpits.org/coll - Go Collimated or Go Home.
Some people collect things for a hobby. Geeks collect hobbies.
ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment
A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes.
http://scarlet.deltasoft.com - Get it _today_!
9:57 a.m.
Another article on this subject today. This one claims the
Mainframe in question is 40 years old. Maybe it really is
a 360/40. :-)
bill
5 Apr
5 Apr
10:25 p.m.
It was thus said that the Great Fred Cisin via cctalk once stated:
Math.
-spc (Had some comp-sci profs who didn't like programming or computers)
>Edsger
Dijksta said, "The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching
>should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense."
On Sun, 5 Apr 2020, geneb wrote:
I'm pretty sure he said that about BASIC, and
I'm totally bummed he died
before I could bitch slap him over it. ;)
well, close.
His BASIC quote is:
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that
have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are
mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
Here is one copy of his 1975 paper, "How Do We Tell Truths That Might
Hurt":
https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/ewd498.html
I don't know what language(s), if any, that he liked. 
7 Apr
7 Apr
3:20 a.m.
At 18:25 05-04-20, you wrote:
It was thus said that the Great Fred Cisin via cctalk
once stated:
Math.
-spc (Had some comp-sci profs who didn't like programming or computers)
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.
>Edsger
Dijksta said, "The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching
>should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense."
On Sun, 5 Apr 2020, geneb wrote:
I'm pretty sure he said that about BASIC, and
I'm totally bummed he died
before I could bitch slap him over it. ;)
well, close.
His BASIC quote is:
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that
have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are
mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
Here is one copy of his 1975 paper, "How Do We Tell Truths That Might
Hurt":
https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/ewd498.html
I don't know what language(s), if any, that he liked. 
16 Apr
16 Apr
4:06 p.m.
On Sun, Apr 05, 2020 at 01:20:09PM -0700, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
[...]
well, close.
His BASIC quote is:
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students
that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers
they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
Here is one copy of his 1975 paper, "How Do We Tell Truths That
Might Hurt":
https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/ewd498.html
I don't know what language(s), if any, that he liked.
Perhaps this quote will help:
(...) The Burroughs ALGOL compiler was very fast ? this impressed
the Dutch scientist Edsger Dijkstra when he submitted a program to
be compiled at the B5000 Pasadena plant. His deck of cards was
compiled almost immediately and he immediately wanted several
machines for his university, Eindhoven University of Technology in
the Netherlands. The compiler was fast for several reasons, but the
primary reason was that it was a one-pass compiler. Early computers
did not have enough memory to store the source code, so compilers
(and even assemblers) usually needed to read the source code more
than once. The Burroughs ALGOL syntax, unlike the official
language, requires that each variable (or other object) be declared
before it is used, so it is feasible to write an ALGOL compiler
that reads the data only once. This concept has profound
theoretical implications, but it also permits very fast
compiling. Burroughs large systems could compile as fast as they
could read the source code from the punched cards, and they had the
fastest card readers in the industry.
(from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_large_systems )
Whatever he liked, it looks that he optimised for speed of
execution.
--
Regards,
Tomasz Rola
--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... **
** **
** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com **
5 Apr
5 Apr
12:35 p.m.
On 4/5/20 12:22 PM, Zane Healy via cctalk wrote:
And, if the happen to get those "volunteers", they will get
exactly what they paid for and the trade press will get even
more rocks to throw at COBOL.
bill
On Apr 5, 2020, at 6:41 AM, Stefan Skoglund via
cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
l?r 2020-04-04 klockan 21:47 -0700 skrev Fred Cisin via cctalk:
What?s really funny, in a sad way, if you read the article above carefully, and you watch
the clip. They?re looking for *VOLUNTEERS* to do this work!
https://www.latestly.com/technology/new-jersey-governor-needs-cobol-program…
On Sat, 4 Apr 2020, Jeffrey Brace via cctalk
wrote:
https://josephsteinberg.com/covid-19-response-new-jersey-urgently-needs-cob…
In December 1999, they were looking for COBOL programmers.
They were told to update their software.
Now, 20 years later, they are looking for COBOL programmers, to start
the
update project.
To be fair, in this case updating your software means:
throw out the baby with the water
build a completely new IT infrastructure with everything
and expect things to work badly the next 5-8 years....
long enough to hinder/(be a millstone around) the governor's re-
election campagin
and then in 15 years, be prepared to redo....
Pundits like this steinberg is right and wrong - they doesn't
acknowledge how expensive new fangled information technology is.
12:56 p.m.
What?s really funny, in a sad way, if you read the
article above carefully, and you watch the clip.
They?re looking for *VOLUNTEERS* to do thbis work!
That's problematic. And now that I said I know COBOL81, I could find
myself kidnapped by NJ Govt agents and chained to a VT05 terminal.
No, no, not 12 lines per screen! HELP!!!!
1:27 p.m.
Chris Zach wrote:
That's problematic. And now that I said I know
COBOL81, I could find
myself kidnapped by NJ Govt agents and chained to a VT05 terminal.
No, no, not 12 lines per screen! HELP!!!!
Am I wrong in understanding the VT05 was 20 lines, and the VT50 12
lines?
By the way, I believe the VT50 character font is slightly different from
VT52. Does anyone have the ROMs?
2:02 p.m.
On Apr 5, 2020, at 1:27 PM, Lars Brinkhoff via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
Chris Zach wrote:
Correct. The VT05 has 72 columns rather than 80. And it requires fill after line feed at
higher speeds so the scroll can finish before the next character.
paul
That's problematic. And now that I said I
know COBOL81, I could find
myself kidnapped by NJ Govt agents and chained to a VT05 terminal.
No, no, not 12 lines per screen! HELP!!!!
Am I wrong in understanding the VT05 was 20 lines, and the VT50 12
lines?
2:26 p.m.
On April 5, 2020 at 11:56 AM Chris Zach via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
It New Jersey. They will simply make you an offer you can't refuse!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeldwfOwuL8
What?s really funny, in a sad way, if you read
the article above carefully, and you watch the clip.They?re looking for *VOLUNTEERS* to do
thbis work!That's problematic. And now that I said I know COBOL81, I could findmyself
kidnapped by NJ Govt agents and chained to a VT05 terminal.
No, no, not 12 lines
per screen! HELP!!!!
4:13 p.m.
> They were told to update their software.
> Now, 20 years later, they are looking for COBOL programmers, to start
> the update project.
On Sun, 5 Apr 2020, Stefan Skoglund wrote:
To be fair, in this case updating your software
means:
throw out the baby with the water
build a completely new IT infrastructure with everything
and expect things to work badly the next 5-8 years....
long enough to hinder/(be a millstone around) the governor's re-
election campagin
and then in 15 years, be prepared to redo....
Pundits like this steinberg is right and wrong - they doesn't
acknowledge how expensive new fangled information technology is.
I notice that he is one who equates changing/updating software with
security.
If a project is needed, and takes a long time, taking a long time is not a
good reason to avoid getting started.
Napoleon ordered planting of a lot of trees. I'm told that one of his
officers didn't want to get around to it, because they would take a long
time to grow; Napoleon said that that was a good reason to do it
immediately.
(No, I can't find the quote)
10:24 a.m.
On 4/4/20 11:06 PM, Jeffrey Brace via cctalk wrote:
Yet another article loaded with BS denigrating COBOL.
The product of a very flawed academic system that decided
to destroy COBOL because its users refused to accept that
academics know what's best for the industry.
bill
1:31 p.m.
On 4/5/20 7:24 AM, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote:
Yet another article loaded with BS denigrating COBOL.
The product of a very flawed academic system that decided
to destroy COBOL because its users refused to accept that
academics know what's best for the industry.
COBOL was remarkable in several respects. Structured records being one
of them. (FLOW-MATIC was actually a bit superior in that the record
structure information was separate from the program). Strong data
typing was another one.
Grace Hopper did a remarkable job keeping the CODASYL show together,
long before ANSI took an interest in standardizing languages.
On the other hand, there's always PL/I--a language for everybody and
nobody. Be ye FORTRAN, COBOL or Algol programmer, you can, like Burger
King, have it your way. A co-worker from IBM once told me that the
original IBM PL/I committee was a band of misfits.
--Chuck
1558
days inactive
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