Hi, Joey,
If you believe the closed captioning (Always a bad idea...),
he was saying COBALT.
The first job I had at I.P. Sharp Associates, working for Roger D. Moore,
was brown-thumbing the IPSCOBOL compiler, then under development
and, mostly, working. Most of my efforts went into the area that
Roger had least confidence in, the "mover". This part of the compiler
was responsible for converting between COBOL's myriad data types,
e.g., Zoned Floating Point to Packed Roman Numeral. Given a myriad
data types, that meant I had to come up with myriad×myriad unit tests.
There were enough of these that I ended up learning APL, at Roger's
suggestion, to generate unit tests and check results. That mostly
worked, but the latter part often took a Very Long Time. Roger
and I looked at my efforts, and he conjectured that
dyadic iota (x⍳y) was the bottleneck. A look at the source code
confirmed that the algorithm in question was of quadratic complexity.
Roger's "suggestion" on how to deal with this was: "Fix it.", by which
he meant the APL interpreter. Which I did, designing and implementing
several linear-time algorithms for epsilon and iota. That led to my
first-ever technical paper, at APL73, which looks very clearly
to me like a first-ever... Luckily, my knee-shaking stage fright and
trepidation
at the thought of giving a talk before hundreds of people at the conference
was eased by a minute or two of pre-presentation coaching by
the session chair, a kindly gentleman named Eugene McDonnell, AKA eem.
Gene told me:
- Don't worry about content: you know more about this than anybody in
the audience.
- If you're nervous, pick somebody in the audience who you know, and
pretend you're talking one-on-one to them. You can even pick me,
if you like,
he said, with his usual winning smile.
So I did, and it apparently went well.
Many moons later (1990's, maybe), I got a call out of the blue from
a headhunter in Tennessee, looking for a COBOL consultant.
He told me that he had called me because I was highly
skilled in that area, and that there were not a lot of people with expertise
there. That went like this:
Me: I see. What are you offering as an hourly fee?
Him: Well, you know that people are in great demand here,
so we are offering an excellent rate: $15USD/hour.
Me: I pay my house cleaner more than that. Try appending a zero to
that rate.
Him: {click}
Bob
On 2020-04-06 1:47 p.m., Joey K Tuttle wrote:
I found the announcement video ( https://youtu.be/HSVgHlSTPYQ ) > amusing, in that the "kid" making the announcement morphed COBOL
into > COBOLT (consistently). > > @bakerjd99 - Agree with your sentiment
about long overdue kudos for > the workhorses of the previous century. >
>> On 2020Apr 6, at 10:36, John Baker <[email protected]> wrote: >>
>> So can we blame COBOL for the head-up-the-anterior response we're >>
enjoying in the confused states of America? >> >> Just kidding - any
program that operates with minimal changes for >> decades has to be
respected. The old COBOLians are finally getting >> long overdue kudos.
>> >> For my social distancing command bunker - Cheers >> >> On Mon,
Apr 6, 2020 at 11:12 AM 'Jim Russell' via Chat >> <[email protected]>
wrote: >> >>> Many years ago, I prided myself on my COBOL skills; at one
point >>> I had about 50 COBOL programmers working for three supervisors
in >>> the COBOL coding shop I managed. >>> >>> When I worked more
recently for a then quite new Government >>> agency, I was distressed to
find that the Personnel/Payroll >>> systems were all COBOL based, still
relying on fixed position >>> ascii records. >>> >>>> On Apr 6, 2020, at
12:50 PM, Skip Cave >>>> <[email protected]> wrote: >>>> >>>> Why
Covid-19 has resulted in New Jersey desperately needing >>>> COBOL
programmers. >>>
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>>> >>> For information about J forums see
http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
>> >> >> -- John D. Baker [email protected] >>
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>> >> For information about J forums see
http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
>
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> For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
--
Robert Bernecky
Snake Island Research Inc
18 Fifth Street
Ward's Island
Toronto, Ontario M5J 2B9
[email protected]
tel: +1 416 203 0854
text/cell: +1 416 996 4286
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