strangest systems I've sent email from

[Chuck Guzis]

On 04/25/2016 10:50 AM, Brian L. Stuart wrote:

> I usually try to stay out of such discussions, but I think it's
> important to draw some distinctions here.  First, it's not pointing
> out which languages/techniques are popular that's narrow-
> minded and short-sighted.  It's the view that popularity and
> "commercial viability" is the primary consideration of value
> in education that's narrow-minded and short-sighted.  

Exactly to the point!   In its day, JOVIAL was a great programming
language, but who the heck knows it today?  In 1970, a student taking a
programming languages course would be likely be exposed to COBOL,
FORTRAN, Algol and perhaps PL/I.  How many students today are conversant
in those?  Those were the big "general-purpose" languages and you'd be
unlikely to find a job not knowing at least two of those.

We ran into that with COBOL and Y2K, which surprised me, since I didn't
think that COBOL had quite gone out of fashion yet in 1998.  Back then I
wondered if there were any extant 7080 autocoder applications still
running around (running under emulation) that needed updating.

Times change and it's always best to take the broad view of learning as
many languages as opportunity affords.

Down at the bottom, it's all machine code.

--Chuck