[ale] [ALE] Happy Birthday BASIC

[DJPfulio at jdpfu.com]

On 5/23/24 10:28, Chuck Payne via Ale wrote:
> 
> I am surprise with all the talk of fortran, that poor cobol being left in the cold.

COBOL is for business majors.  Science and engineering used FORTRAN.  Probably because there were huge math and engineering libraries for it.

The first time I ever met anyone who had ever used COBOL was in my 30s.  He struggled to learn UNIX and java.  The company was paying for his training and he was surprised at how more productive he could be.  It was a completely new experience for his mainframe-ass.

I started out with BASIC, then FORTRAN66, then a few variants of FORTRAN in college before my first real job, cross-compiling on an IBM mainframe for an AP-101/S.  While there, the company pushed people to learn Ada, but I chose to learn C and C++ instead. More generalized use.  Ada would likely have trapped me in more DoD work.

Learning C/C++ on PC-DOS, OS/2 and working some after hours projects for the company made it possible to switch to a different contract that used UNIX, not mainframes. Our team supported all the UNIXen, Win32s and MacOS with the same code.

Actually met Maddog at a small meeting in Houston because our primary platform was Alpha on OSF/1. He was handing out "RedHat and Alpha" temporary tattoos and trying to convince us that we should get behind Linux since the hardware platform wasn't going to be as important as the OS and Linux was being ported to everything.  He was right, but a little early. ;)   Visionaries often are.  The customer didn't want us using any F/LOSS at all at the time and they didn't want us connected to the internet for any programming.  Almost all programming happened in an air-gapped network using tools that they'd approved and provided. Doing what the customer wants is important.

That job completely changed everything in my life.  It's like switching from driving a moped (MS-Windows) or a train pulling 1000 boxcars (TSO/ISPF), to a Ferrari that could scale up or down to the size needed.  I've used everything with Unix from Cray systems down to thumb-sized NAS devices and they all fell about the same at the shell.  Oddly, I've never used any Vax or PDP systems.  The lab were I worked had one of almost everything, just not those.

Before sending someone to learn BASIC, I'd put them on bash or python.  Whenever a bash script is over 1 page, I use that as a sign to move to a better language, if that's an option.  I'm a perl guy, so perl is my poison, but for someone new who can get passed the mandated/stupid indentation then Python is probably the best 2nd language.  Then I'd go with C.

Of course, if someone is being paid to use "Joe's Language" (whatever that is), then that's what they need to learn and know.