I've mentioned before that once I dropped my first major, I floundered around a little before settling on Accounting. I had a best friend who was moving from Pennsylvania to southern California about this time, and he came by way of North Carolina to give me a visit on his way out there. He'd already learned something about programming, so I asked him to describe it for me.
I guess he didn’t care for it all that much, because it sounded boring. But in the end I decided that an accountant in the '70s really must know something about computers, so I signed up for a summer course in PL/1. I caught fire almost immediately, and have been a programmer at heart ever since, no matter what my job title was. Looking back on that time, I said at first "I was made to do this". Later on I said "I had a good teacher, but really I was made to do this." Nowadays I still think I was made to do it, but I linger much, much longer on "I had a good teacher". I honor that man. One important feature of that class is that he had us writing programs the very first day. If you're going to write a program to compare two numbers and tell you which one is larger, he asked us, what's the first thing you have to do? We all made bad guesses with verbs like "print" and "compare" and "decide", and after a few minutes he pointed out that the first thing you have to do is "get the first number". He went on from there, writing the program on the board. Remember this was a PL/1 class -- actually a subset of PL/1 called "seven-statement PL/C", I think -- so the verb GET is native PL/1; it does STREAM input. The rest of the explanation likewise used PL/1 keywords, so we didn't notice at first that we were learning PL/1 syntax; it looked and felt like ordinary logical instructions. We were repairing to the computer center and typing up our own attempts at PL/C programs before a week had gone by. I forget how we ran them; I suppose he must have handed out some JCL cards that we could put around our own cards and hand them to the HASP operator to submit. Halfway through the summer that class was ended, but I was hooked and started spending much of my time at the computer center (much to the disgust of my fiancée) writing my own programs and teaching myself BASIC and FORTRAN. They offered me a student job for the fall semester; I finished my degree in Accounting but I've never done anything but computers afterward. I say all this partly because I'm afflicted with logorrhea, but also because while I was working at the computer center (mostly my job was to help fellow students diagnose simple compile-time errors) I learned that some folks taking COBOL were six weeks into the class, getting lots and lots of theory, before they wrote their first line of code, and they were halfway through the semester before learning about loops. In my view this is a TERR9IBLE way to teach coding! I have to admit it isn't clear to me how COBOL could be taught the same way as PL/1, since there's so much crap you have to write before you can get into the procedure division, but still...! I doubt my enthusiasm would have awakened at that introduction. --- Bob Bridges, [email protected], cell 336 382-7313 /* The people most apt to want the pleasures of marriage without the obligations are, as you may have observed, young men. Men complain about marriage. Women don't complain about marriage; they complain about men. -Joseph Sobran */ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
