Re: Know any Fortran programmers who need a more interesting job?

[Lee Courtney]

"I still think a 3 tape sort should be a required early assignment (learn
that not everything can fit into memory at once).

TTFN - Guy"

Second.

Lee C.

On Fri, Oct 30, 2015 at 12:15 PM, Guy Sotomayor  wrote:

>
> > On Oct 30, 2015, at 11:35 AM, Paul Koning 
> wrote:
> >
> >
> >> On Oct 30, 2015, at 2:16 PM, Noel Chiappa 
> wrote:
> >>
> >> ...
> >> Apparently nobody had ever told them that a number in memory is... just
> a
> >> number. At which point it became clear that they needed to know a little
> >> more about how a computer actually worked.
> >
> > That reminds me of an exchange I had with a younger colleague who was
> writing a document describing how to do incremental TCP checksum update
> correctly.  He was tripping over the issue of negative zero.  I told him
> the answer simply was to subtract the complement with end around borrow.
> He didn't believe me and ended up proving it by exhaustively testing every
> case.
> >
> >
> My favorite of this class of issues, was when I was working at a startup
> doing an embedded product with Linux as the OS.  We all had Linux machines
> for building/testing.  I was responsible for the Linux kernel at the
> company.  I had someone come up to me and said “the VM system is broken…my
> program works fine on my desktop but I keep getting page faults on the
> embedded platform”.  The conversation was something like this:
> Me:  So, what’s the program doing memory wise?
> Him: I allocate an array of structures and I read them off of disk into
> the array.
> Me: How big are the structures?
> Him: About 4K
> Me: How many are you allocating?
> Him: 100,000
> Me: Rolls eyes.  That’s 4GB.  We don’t have 4GB on the embedded platform.
> You don’t even have that on your workstation.
> Him: But it works there and not on the embedded platform.
> Me: We don’t have paging turned on in the embedded platform.
> Him: Can’t we turn it on?  It makes my code so simple!
> Me: No!  Go allocate a *reasonable* sized array (say 100) and shuffle in
> from the disk when the data you need isn’t there.  You walk the data
> structure mostly sequentially anyway, so there’s no reason to have the
> entire file in memory.
>
> I still think a 3 tape sort should be a required early assignment (learn
> that not everything can fit into memory at once).
>
> TTFN - Guy
>
>


-- 
Lee Courtney
+1-650-704-3934 cell

Re: Know any Fortran programmers who need a more interesting job?

[Fred Cisin]

> "I still think a 3 tape sort should be a required early assignment 
> (learn that not everything can fit into memory at once).

On Fri, 30 Oct 2015, Lee Courtney wrote:

Second.


It's hard to get students to care about what you are saying when you 
mention tapes.  You need to explain the algorithms using files.

Even though CD/DVD is a sequential storage system.

Re: Know any Fortran programmers who need a more interesting job?

[Jecel Assumpcao Jr.]

Noel Chiappa wrote:
> It's worth teaching a bit of machine/assembler language, so that students
> understand how computers _actually work_, underneath.
> 
> [example of students who wrote octal math for CLU]

Back in 1983 I needed an assembler for the Motorola 6809, so I wrote one
in Lisp on a TRS-80 Model I. I know very well how things really work (I
design microprocessors at the transistor level) and yet I created a hex
math package in Lisp just like in your example. Sure it was orders of
magnitude slower than using the language's native math and doing all the
conversions in the i/o routines, but it was very elegant and was fast
enough for the sizes of the programs we needed to assemble.

So while I insist on knowing all the details, I also enjoy tools that
don't depend on me knowing.

-- Jecel

Re: Know any Fortran programmers who need a more interesting job?

[Paul Koning]

> On Oct 30, 2015, at 5:29 AM, Liam Proven  wrote:
> 
> «Why NASA Needs a Programmer Fluent In 60-Year-Old Languages
> 
> To keep the Voyager 1 and 2 crafts going, NASA's new hire has to know
> FORTRAN and assembly languages.
> »
> 
> http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a17991/voyager-1-voyager-2-retiring-engineer/

Neat.  I would think that a large fraction of the membership of this list is 
qualified for that job.  Assembly language programming, on a machine with such 
large memory as 64k?  Sure.  Fortran?  Algol?  Even those who don't know can 
likely learn it easily.

The key requirement is the mindset needed to work on old computers, with (by 
today's standards) slow execution and small memory.  That's something most of 
us have, either from actually doing it, or from being interested in it.

paul

Re: Know any Fortran programmers who need a more interesting job?

[Liam Proven]

On 30 October 2015 at 16:28, Paul Koning  wrote:
> Neat.  I would think that a large fraction of the membership of this list is 
> qualified for that job.


That's why I posted it! :-)



-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk • GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lpro...@hotmail.com • Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) • +420 702 829 053 (ČR)

Re: Know any Fortran programmers who need a more interesting job?

[Jerry Weiss]

> On Oct 30, 2015, at 10:28 AM, Paul Koning  wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Oct 30, 2015, at 5:29 AM, Liam Proven  wrote:
>> 
>> «Why NASA Needs a Programmer Fluent In 60-Year-Old Languages
>> 
>> To keep the Voyager 1 and 2 crafts going, NASA's new hire has to know
>> FORTRAN and assembly languages.
>> »
>> 
>> http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a17991/voyager-1-voyager-2-retiring-engineer/
> 
> Neat.  I would think that a large fraction of the membership of this list is 
> qualified for that job.  Assembly language programming, on a machine with 
> such large memory as 64k?  Sure.  Fortran?  Algol?  Even those who don't know 
> can likely learn it easily.
> 
> The key requirement is the mindset needed to work on old computers, with (by 
> today's standards) slow execution and small memory.  That's something most of 
> us have, either from actually doing it, or from being interested in it.
> 
>   paul
> 
> 

Additionally a QSL Card from Oort Cloud or Kuiper Belt to hang in the Ham Shack 
would be nice.


Jerry
wb9mri

Re: Know any Fortran programmers who need a more interesting job?

[Chuck Guzis]

On 10/30/2015 02:29 AM, Liam Proven wrote:

«Why NASA Needs a Programmer Fluent In 60-Year-Old Languages


I think the demise of FORTRAN is overstated.  That there is an X3 group 
still advancing the language attests to that.  While FORTRAN may be a 
60-year old language, Fortran is not.


As far as assembly, I don't believe that it's a dead language.  When you 
need simple, rugged, low-power hardware, it's still a very good way to go.


--Chuck

Re: Know any Fortran programmers who need a more interesting job?

[Diane Bruce]

On Fri, Oct 30, 2015 at 09:01:38AM -0700, Chuck Guzis wrote:
> On 10/30/2015 02:29 AM, Liam Proven wrote:
> > «Why NASA Needs a Programmer Fluent In 60-Year-Old Languages
> 
> I think the demise of FORTRAN is overstated.  That there is an X3 group 
> still advancing the language attests to that.  While FORTRAN may be a 
> 60-year old language, Fortran is not.

Joe still loves his Fortran. In fact, many Scientist/Engineers seem to
still use Fortran.

http://www.physics.princeton.edu/pulsar/K1JT/i

> 
> As far as assembly, I don't believe that it's a dead language.  When you 
> need simple, rugged, low-power hardware, it's still a very good way to go.
> 
> --Chuck
> 
> 
> 

-- 
- d...@freebsd.org d...@db.net http://www.db.net/~db

Re: Know any Fortran programmers who need a more interesting job?

[Jerome H. Fine]

>Liam Proven wrote:


«Why NASA Needs a Programmer Fluent In 60-Year-Old Languages

To keep the Voyager 1 and 2 crafts going, NASA's new hire has to know
FORTRAN and assembly languages.
»

http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a17991/voyager-1-voyager-2-retiring-engineer/


Does anyone have any idea as to the actual hardware platform?
I used an IBM 7094 II back around 1965 using both FORTRAN
and assembly language, but that was only 50 years ago.

There was no operating system, just a batch stream of one job
at a time.  All I/O was via a 1401 for both input and output.

But it did work well for that era.

Jerome Fine

Re: Know any Fortran programmers who need a more interesting job?

[Guy Sotomayor]

> On Oct 30, 2015, at 11:35 AM, Paul Koning  wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Oct 30, 2015, at 2:16 PM, Noel Chiappa  wrote:
>> 
>> ...
>> Apparently nobody had ever told them that a number in memory is... just a
>> number. At which point it became clear that they needed to know a little
>> more about how a computer actually worked.
> 
> That reminds me of an exchange I had with a younger colleague who was writing 
> a document describing how to do incremental TCP checksum update correctly.  
> He was tripping over the issue of negative zero.  I told him the answer 
> simply was to subtract the complement with end around borrow.  He didn't 
> believe me and ended up proving it by exhaustively testing every case.
> 
> 
My favorite of this class of issues, was when I was working at a startup doing 
an embedded product with Linux as the OS.  We all had Linux machines for 
building/testing.  I was responsible for the Linux kernel at the company.  I 
had someone come up to me and said “the VM system is broken…my program works 
fine on my desktop but I keep getting page faults on the embedded platform”.  
The conversation was something like this:
Me:  So, what’s the program doing memory wise?
Him: I allocate an array of structures and I read them off of disk into the 
array.
Me: How big are the structures?
Him: About 4K
Me: How many are you allocating?
Him: 100,000
Me: Rolls eyes.  That’s 4GB.  We don’t have 4GB on the embedded platform.  You 
don’t even have that on your workstation.
Him: But it works there and not on the embedded platform.
Me: We don’t have paging turned on in the embedded platform.
Him: Can’t we turn it on?  It makes my code so simple!
Me: No!  Go allocate a *reasonable* sized array (say 100) and shuffle in from 
the disk when the data you need isn’t there.  You walk the data structure 
mostly sequentially anyway, so there’s no reason to have the entire file in 
memory.

I still think a 3 tape sort should be a required early assignment (learn that 
not everything can fit into memory at once).

TTFN - Guy

Re: Know any Fortran programmers who need a more interesting job?

[Paul Koning]

> On Oct 30, 2015, at 12:39 PM, Sean Caron  wrote:
> 
> ...
> What concerns me is the amount of code these days that is being written in
> languages that has no formal standard at all. Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, the
> list goes on ... I wonder how much of it will still be useful in ten or
> fifteen years.

Good question.  Then again, only a few languages I can think of had a formal 
standard from the start: Algol 68 and Algol 68, plus probably Ada (don't know 
that one well enough to be definite about it).

All the others were either never standardized, or standardized long after the 
fact.  The ones you list are examples of the former, as are many others (PL/I 
for example?); examples of the latter include Fortran, C, APL, COBOL, Pascal, 
and presumably many others as well.

Also, being useable 10-15 years from now requires the availability of 
compatible implementations, or enough information to allow them to be created.  
Standardization is only very loosely connected to that.  For one thing, 
standards generally change what existed before (indeed, this is often a 
deliberate part of the process).  ANSI C is not compatible with K C, though 
converting one to the other isn't terribly hard, and supporting both isn't 
either.  Similarly, ANSI Fortran isn't FORTRAN II.  Nor is Python 3 the same as 
Python 1.5.  But all of these are manageable conversion problems.

For that matter, there's translation.  You don't need a standard for the 
implementation language of some algorithm; it suffices (at the cost of some 
labor) to have an understanding of whatever language it was written in, and the 
knowledge to translate that to a currently available language.

paul

Re: Know any Fortran programmers who need a more interesting job?

[Fred Cisin]

On Fri, 30 Oct 2015, Chuck Guzis wrote:
I think the demise of FORTRAN is overstated.  That there is an X3 group still 
advancing the language attests to that.  While FORTRAN may be a 60-year old 
language, Fortran is not.


Which one is NASA looking for?  FORTRAN/Fortran in general, or expertise 
with the variants from half a century ago?



As far as assembly, I don't believe that it's a dead language.  When you need 
simple, rugged, low-power hardware, it's still a very good way to go.


The rumors of its demise have been around for a long time.

2 or 3 decades ago, the folk controlling lower division undergraduate 
"Computer Science" at UC (pronounced "UCK") Berkeley, Clancy and Harvey, 
declared, "Assembly language is dead! Nobody will ever program in it 
again.", and shifted their program to Scheme/Lisp.   They also 
discontinued any beginning courses in C, claiming that anybody entering 
college for Computer Science should/would "already know C".
That increased UC Berkeley student enrollment in the C classes that I 
taught at Merritt College  (Peralta Community College District), and our 
Fortram classes got a lot of UC Berkeley students who had Fortran as a 
degree requirement in various science departments.


Philippe Kahn said, about his "Turbo-Assembler", that "Assembly language 
is not for programming; it is for debugging".


I have to admit that assembly language may no longer be a great career 
path, but there will always be need for some levels of hand optimization.


Note: I realize that some may feel a need to differentiate between machine 
language programming and assembly language programming.  I acknowledge 
the difference, but feel that in this context they can be lumped together.



It is always amusing how desperate some peop[le seem to be to declare the 
demise of any systems that they aren't involved in.



--
Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com

Re: Know any Fortran programmers who need a more interesting job?

[Chuck Guzis]

On 10/30/2015 10:38 AM, Jerome H. Fine wrote:


There was no operating system, just a batch stream of one job at a
time.  All I/O was via a 1401 for both input and output.


IBSYS and/or FMS don't qualify as operating systems?  The usage of the 
1401 to do unit record I/O was the original application of the term 
"SPOOL".  Many use the term today, uncapitalized, without realizing that 
it's an acronym.


--Chuck

Re: Know any Fortran programmers who need a more interesting job?

[Paul Koning]

> On Oct 30, 2015, at 1:02 PM, Diane Bruce  wrote:
> 
>> ...
>> Just the other day, I converted a 9 track tape from the 90s from Ft. 
>> George Meade that involved antenna design software.  It was FORTRAN and 
>> compiled quite nicely under f77.

NEC 2?

I've had a copy of NEC-2, in Fortran, for perhaps 2 decades now.  I also got 
the manual from government archives.  Works nicely.

paul

Re: Know any Fortran programmers who need a more interesting job?

[Chuck Guzis]

On 10/30/2015 10:17 AM, Paul Koning wrote:



NEC 2?

I've had a copy of NEC-2, in Fortran, for perhaps 2 decades now.  I
also got the manual from government archives.  Works nicely.


No, something called FERM--developed at Lincoln Labs and distributed 
through USG, by all appearances.


--Chuck

Re: Know any Fortran programmers who need a more interesting job?

[Chuck Guzis]

On 10/30/2015 09:35 AM, Diane Bruce wrote:


Joe still loves his Fortran. In fact, many Scientist/Engineers seem
to still use Fortran.

http://www.physics.princeton.edu/pulsar/K1JT/i


Sorry, that URL gets me to a 404.

Just the other day, I converted a 9 track tape from the 90s from Ft. 
George Meade that involved antenna design software.  It was FORTRAN and 
compiled quite nicely under f77.


So not as uncommon as people think, perhaps.

--Chuck

Re: Know any Fortran programmers who need a more interesting job?

[Robert Feldman]

>From: "Jerome H. Fine" 
>Does anyone have any idea as to the actual hardware platform?
> Jerome Fine
 
>From 
>http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/30/has_voyager_1_escaped_the_sun_yet_yes_but_also_no_say_boffins/:
> 
"250 Khz General Electric 18-bit TTL CPUs, complete with single register 
accumulator and bit-serial access to 2096-word plated-wire RAM"
 
  

RE: Know any Fortran programmers who need a more interesting job?

[Robert Jarratt]

> -Original Message-
> From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-boun...@classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Fred
Cisin
> Sent: 30 October 2015 17:51
> To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
> Subject: Re: Know any Fortran programmers who need a more interesting job?
> 
> On Fri, 30 Oct 2015, Jerome H. Fine wrote:
> > Does anyone have any idea as to the actual hardware platform?
> > I used an IBM 7094 II back around 1965 using both FORTRAN and assembly
> > language, but that was only 50 years ago.
> > There was no operating system, just a batch stream of one job at a
> > time.  All I/O was via a 1401 for both input and output.
> > But it did work well for that era.
> 
> In 1970, at Goddard Space Flight Center, Space Sciences Data Center, we
> used FORTRAN on a 7094 with a 360/30 for I/O.   But we also used FORTRAN
> on several 360/9x machines, and sometimes APL on time sharing (selectric
> terminal)
> 
> I wonder when the 7094s finally got retired.

Has anyone actually managed to find this job posting? I had a quick look on
the main Nasa site and also on the JPL site, and couldn't find it at all. I
am curious to read it.

Regards

Rob

Re: Know any Fortran programmers who need a more interesting job?

[Noel Chiappa]

> From: Fred Cisin

> 2 or 3 decades ago, the folk controlling lower division undergraduate
> "Computer Science" at UC .. declared, "Assembly language is dead!
> Nobody will ever program in it again.", and shifted their program to
> Scheme/Lisp.
> ..
> assembly language may no longer be a great career path, but there will
> always be need for some levels of hand optimization.

It's worth teaching a bit of machine/assembler language, so that students
understand how computers _actually work_, underneath.

There's a semi-famous incident from a couple of decades back at MIT: they
were teaching a programming course in CLU (an "object-based" language which
contributed many ideas to object-oriented programming). So one assignment was
to write an assembler - which required being able to print octal numbers.

So quite a few of the students wrote 'octal clusters' ('cluster' is CLU
jargon for the collection of routines which know-how/are-allowed to operate
on members of a class), which used normal decimal read and write to do
input/output - and had 'octal add' etc routines which took apart two 'octal
numbers' abcdef, stored as the decimal number abcdef, into their constituent
digits, added them together individually, did the carries, and then put it
all back together. (I am not making this up. This really happened.)

Apparently nobody had ever told them that a number in memory is... just a
number. At which point it became clear that they needed to know a little
more about how a computer actually worked.

Noel

Re: Know any Fortran programmers who need a more interesting job?

[Toby Thain]

On 2015-10-30 2:16 PM, Noel Chiappa wrote:

 > From: Fred Cisin

 > 2 or 3 decades ago, the folk controlling lower division undergraduate
 > "Computer Science" at UC .. declared, "Assembly language is dead!
 > Nobody will ever program in it again.", and shifted their program to
 > Scheme/Lisp.
 > ..
 > assembly language may no longer be a great career path, but there will
 > always be need for some levels of hand optimization.

It's worth teaching a bit of machine/assembler language, so that students
understand how computers _actually work_, underneath.

There's a semi-famous incident from a couple of decades back at MIT: they
were teaching a programming course in CLU (an "object-based" language which
contributed many ideas to object-oriented programming). So one assignment was
to write an assembler - which required being able to print octal numbers.

So quite a few of the students wrote 'octal clusters' ('cluster' is CLU
jargon for the collection of routines which know-how/are-allowed to operate
on members of a class), which used normal decimal read and write to do
input/output - and had 'octal add' etc routines which took apart two 'octal
numbers' abcdef, stored as the decimal number abcdef, into their constituent
digits, added them together individually, did the carries, and then put it
all back together. (I am not making this up. This really happened.)

Apparently nobody had ever told them that a number in memory is... just a
number. At which point it became clear that they needed to know a little
more about how a computer actually worked.


Pretty sure this same thing is repeated somewhere with every generation 
of programmers :-)


But I'm not sure why anyone is shocked at "60 year old languages" being 
required. People are constantly telling us to use a FORTY year old 
language for crypto and systems work as if nothing had been learned since.


--Toby




Noel

Re: Know any Fortran programmers who need a more interesting job?

[Paul Koning]

> On Oct 30, 2015, at 2:16 PM, Noel Chiappa  wrote:
> 
> ...
> Apparently nobody had ever told them that a number in memory is... just a
> number. At which point it became clear that they needed to know a little
> more about how a computer actually worked.

That reminds me of an exchange I had with a younger colleague who was writing a 
document describing how to do incremental TCP checksum update correctly.  He 
was tripping over the issue of negative zero.  I told him the answer simply was 
to subtract the complement with end around borrow.  He didn't believe me and 
ended up proving it by exhaustively testing every case.

Sigh.

paul

Re: Know any Fortran programmers who need a more interesting job?

[Fred Cisin]

On Fri, 30 Oct 2015, Jerome H. Fine wrote:

Does anyone have any idea as to the actual hardware platform?
I used an IBM 7094 II back around 1965 using both FORTRAN
and assembly language, but that was only 50 years ago.
There was no operating system, just a batch stream of one job
at a time.  All I/O was via a 1401 for both input and output.
But it did work well for that era.


In 1970, at Goddard Space Flight Center, Space Sciences Data Center, we 
used FORTRAN on a 7094 with a 360/30 for I/O.   But we also used FORTRAN 
on several 360/9x machines, and sometimes APL on time sharing (selectric 
terminal)


I wonder when the 7094s finally got retired.