On 17/09/21 11:22, Rob Sargent wrote:
As far as alter, in 1981, before I became a programmer, I asked my
Cobol Programmer friend if there was anything you could put in a
program that would get you fired. He said yes, the alter statement :-).
In my 3 semesters of Cobol, I never once used the Alter statement.
[...]
I was very proud of using an ALTER GOTO in my first program in my 8
week COBOL training course. Now I cringe every time I think about it!
Before the course, I was fluent in FORTRAN IV and had programmed in
ALGOL-68. So I was an experienced programmer.
In what I see now as truly prescient of the early 80's U of BC CS
department, algol-68, snobol, cobol, B, APL and half a dozen others
I've complete forgoten each got a week with the same Towers of Hanoi
task. I can only assume the powers saw the impending dump-heap
relegation of the lot of them. The counter argument was that the major
project was done PL/1.
I've seen some documentation for all those languages except B, but I
never programmed in any of: SNOBOL, B, nor APL. I was sent on a 3 day
PL/1 course, but never used it 'in anger'.
I once tried to discuss general programming ideas with a colleague, and
started talking about a section of code. They then proceeded to tell me
the definition of SECTION in COBOL in detail, I didn't bother to tell
them that I knew 3 things about SECTIONs in COBOL that they hadn't
mentioned. I gave up the discussion, saw no point in continuing, and I
didn't want to appear patronising.
Until one has programmed in several languages, preferably of different
types, it is difficult to separate out programming concepts from the
philosophy and implementation of individual languages.
I think any Master Programmer should have fluency in at least 3
languages and familiarity with at least 3 more. So I think at least 3
languages should be taught to CS students. And of course the importance
of how to RTFM effectively!
Once I helped a colleague debug a Smalltalk example based on a magazine
article I'd read 2 years earlier. I'm certain they implicitly assumed
that I was for more experienced in Smalltalk than I was! Perhaps I
should ask her, but she's probably forgotten -- that was about 30 years
ago. Now I've been married to her for 25 years,
Another time I helped someone develop a screen saver in Visual Basic.
Though it was many years later before I realized the name of the
language. I'd never seen VB before. I even explained the OnEvent
concept even though it was totally new to me, but I still successfully
helped them to implement at least one such construct in the screen
saver. Having experience with a wide variety of different programming
languages was a huge advantage.
Cheers,
Gavin
