On 2/05/2024 8:17 pm, Stephen Loosley wrote:
Sixty years ago, on May 1, 1964, at 4 am in the morning, a quiet
revolution in computing began at Dartmouth College. That's when
mathematicians John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz successfully ran the
first program written in their newly developed BASIC (Beginner's
All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) programming language on the
college's General Electric GE-225 mainframe.
Little did they know that their creation would go on to democratize
computing and inspire generations of programmers over the next six
decades.
On 3/5/2024 10:53, David wrote:
God I feel old sometimes, but then...
Don't feel lonely - there are a few of us on link (:-)}
David, others: Serious question arising from your further comments.
Back in the day, the concept of a 'superprogrammer' was used, in all
earnestness, to try to generalise on some big project successes.
When the smoke had cleared a decade later, the consensus was that it was
an excellent idea, and that the number of people in the world who had
the necessary characteristics to be a superprogrammer numbered 10 +/- 2.
I'm a (moderately) skilled procedural-language programmer, who lived and
contributed through the 'structured' era, during which we basically
developed a bunch of tools, techniques and training which ensured that
bad COBOL/Fortran/etc. practices and products were overcome, and good
ones became the norm. Loop-control, use (and documentation and
maintenance) of subroutines (by whatever name), generalised data-item
definition, the completeness of exception-handling, are among many
examples of 'good'.
As OO came along, I admired the people who had, and applied, the logic
and engineering mindset to use the languages properly.
And I rapidly came to the conclusion that the number of people in the
world who had the necessary characteristics to be OO programmers
numbered way more than the number of superprogrammers, but way fewer
than the number that we needed, and way fewer than the number of people
who, one way or another, write in (at least partially) OO languages.
And I can see little evidence of tools, techniques and training that
overcome bad, and ensure good, practices and products.
(For one thing, supervision and management of software dev has been very
thin on the ground, partly because it's not easy, but not least because
it's expensive, and quality isn't valued).
David, others, how do you see the scene?
You might want to differentiate between the proportion of software that
is developed within a software engineering context, and the rest ...
Thanks! ... Roger
___________________
I've seen some terrible programming efforts by "democratized"
programmers (even professional engineers back then) who seemed stuck in
the step-by-step computing process, apparently unable to abstract it
even to the level of indexed loops, variables which could cause
divide-by-zero or overflow exceptions, and generalised subroutines.
It's not entirely a 1960's or 1980's issue either. I've noticed some
21st-century software-engineering students seem to have trouble grasping
the concept of object-oriented programming. Supposedly OO software
sometimes include some form of "control program" which effectively
duplicates functions performed by the OO language, but badly.
Interestingly, Fortran IV seems to have evolved as a modern language,
perhaps because of its wide use in areas such as weather modelling.
It's fully parallel, supports OO programming, etc. The latest version is
Fortran 2023 (try telling that to a SWE class :-) - see
https://fortran-lang.org/ <https://fortran-lang.org/> - and I think most
Linux distributions include an earlier version.
One wonders what DIY AI will bring...
_David Lochrin_
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Roger Clarke mailto:[email protected]
T: +61 2 6288 6916 http://www.xamax.com.au http://www.rogerclarke.com
Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd 78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA
Visiting Professorial Fellow UNSW Law & Justice
Visiting Professor in Computer Science Australian National University
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