How Can an Old-School Coder Regain His Chops?

DonLab writes "I was a proficient software engineer in the 1980s, writing hundreds of thousands of lines of ALGOL, FORTRAN, COBOL, and Pascal programs, as well as working in 370 and 8080 assembly language & pre-relational DBMS systems. My hands-on programming career ended when I became a freelance analyst and designer, ultimately retiring young in the early '90s. Now I'd like to reenter the field, but I'm finding that I know nothing about today's post-C languages, programming tools, and computing environments. I wouldn't know where to start learning C++, PHP, Java, HTML5, or PERL, much less how to choose one over the other for a particular application. Can I be the only pre-GUI software designer or hobbyist searching for a way to update his skills for Windows, iOS, or Android?"

Comments

C-sharp

[Ethanol-fueled]

Submitter - not trolling, but you should include C# in your list if you want to be relevant today.

Don't hate the players, hate the game.

Re:C-sharp

[alexmipego]

Mono can run way more apps than Wine, specially if you include ASP.Net sites.

Of course, most programmers do stupid mistakes that make it impossible to run in another environment than Windows. The most common one is handling paths like "C:\..." in which case there's nothing Mono can do.

The sources for the main libraries are available from Microsoft and they even include installers so you can see them while debugging an application. I said kinda because the Microsoft license isn't exactly compatible with everything else out there and it isn't exactly built around a community you can simply commit a patch.

Re:C-sharp

[jozlod]

if a scale has C# in it, but also has the note a semi-tone below C#, then you will use a B# In theory, you shouldn't have two forms of the same note in your modal scale, so that note, instead of being a C, becomes a B#

Re:C-sharp

[shutdown -p now]

As far as language features go, Mono fully supports C# 4, and that support was timely available (made to match public betas of .NET 4). It was the same for C# 3. There's no lag in that department.

F/OSS!

[comrade k]

I wouldn't discount languages like C just yet. They're still hugely important in the kernel world, for example.

As far as newer languages go, there are a lot of F/OSS projects that could use another hand. Have a look at the Bugzilla for various projects and grab the latest source from svn/git/mercurial/whatever. Your skills as a programmer should transfer over to a new language relatively easily, and you'll have done a good deed.

Re:Don't

[drolli]

Parent is definitively right.

This guy knows *COBOL* and he thinks for career reasons about new languages? As fas as i understood that COBOL coders are right now (or in a few years) worth their weight in gold; I hold a phd in physics, programmed in nearly all "post-c" languages, (and some non post-c languages) and i was thinking about learning COBOL to earn money.

I mean it could be that he got some offers by now.... (maybe posting to ./ was just a way of applying for a job?).

Re:Work backward

[Netshroud]

If you want to learn Objective-C, the iPhone Application Development course (Stanford) on iTunes U is extremely useful.

Re:FORTRAN and COBOL makes you money

[MAXOMENOS]

That's the other thing you should learn: Oracle PL/SQL and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). SOA these days means SOAP and message busses. At my place of work, we have a legacy COBOL application that needs to connect to the enterprise's Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). We are struggling to find anyone who can do it inside our company.

Depending on what platform your COBOL runs on, you can almost certainly find some way to wrap it in a Java stateless session bean. Turning that into web services is pretty easy these days -- most free IDEs have wizards that will do this for you for the free containers. If you're using IBM stack then WebSphere and Rational are a must.

Point being: Java and Java Enterprise Edition are also very useful here.