[Coco] Somewhat OT: The life of a systems programmer

[John Donaldson]

FORTRAN used to be the Engineering language, then C came along. If you 
look at almost any micro out there, like
the micro that is in the LEGO Mindstorm Robots or micro-controls of 
various forms, they all or either programed in a C
type language or Assembly. The next best language is C#.  BTW, I once 
had a copy of FORTRAN 77 that I got running on a
COCO1 machine under OS9 Level I. I was working at NASA/JSC in Houston 
and we bought some Southwest
6809 machines running Microware OS9. Each of them came with Assembly and 
FORTRAN77.  I have no beef with COBOL.
My departed sister was a wiz at it.

John
AB8YZ

I started in computers back when we had 4 bit CPU's and desktops were 
LSI-11's or PDP-11's.
On 11/18/2013 8:21 AM, billg999 at cs.uofs.edu wrote:
>> On 17/11/2013 5:50 AM, Theodore (Alex) Evans wrote:
>>
>>> Sorry, Steve, I have to disagree.  Those problems are almost
>>> invariably better suited to being dealt with by C, or even FORTRAN.
>>> The range of problems where OOP features are necessary, or even useful
>>> is very very small.
>> OOP is one of the most misunderstand, and more importantly, misused,
>> paradigms in computing. I tend to agree; people tend to look for a way to
>> bend C++ to their problem rather than use the most suitable language
>> and/or
>> features for their problem.
>>
>> And a badly-written C++ program is worse than a badly-written program in
>> almost any other language (except COBOL, where a well-written program is
>> worse than any other language) ;)
> Blasphemy!!!  COBOL is a fine language, in the hands of a good COBOL
> programmer.  But it is often very misunderstood.
>
> bill
>
>
>
>
> --
> Coco mailing list
> Coco at maltedmedia.com
> http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/coco
>