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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?"
Pet project.
There are still plenty of FORTRAN shops out there, or at least legacy FORTRAN applications.
There is a ton of COBOL apps that need maintaining
If you are going to learn anything, it should be stuff that makes you more interesting as a FORTRAN and COBOL coder. For example, get comfortable making HTML/CSS pages. A lot of shops are trying to connect COBOL to the web and SOAP.
Find a web site or book to learn what relational databases are. Everything is relational these days. The NoSQL crowd think they're post-relational, but they still talk in the relational language.
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.
Your future is being the bridge between the past and the future. Learn how to make those old apps do new tricks, and you'll make lots of money.
Learn Perl. Because Perl is like the swiss-army knife for programmers. You may not write an application with it, but you might use it to make bulk changes to a hundred COBOL or FORTRAN source files.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
Don't talk about you know nothing about. Wine is an effort to reverse engineer something that is ill documented, not a standard and huge moving target. It might never worked or work well in every scenario though.
Mono on the other hand is based on the standards which makes it much easier to implement, make it compatible and test. Not every API is ported though, but I can tell you from experience you can create well performing apps that run cross platform with Mono and .Net without a single source code changes (or binary for that matter). Even ASP.Net runs out the box.
If the submitter wishes to learn C# (and I think he should) I even go as far as suggesting he does it on Mono/Linux. Not because I think Linux is great but because it will help you understand the implications of cross platform development which in some little cases the .Net platform did a poor job although it's a primary objective of the whole framework.
Oh, and btw the .Net source code for the core APIs is kinda open source so you can read it too.
Why update at all? There are still legacy systems using FORTRAN and probably COBOL as well. While there are C#, Java, PHP developers all over the place I imagine that finding a developer to maintain a legacy system is extremely hard. Of course that means there will not be many jobs out there for you but the pool of qualified applicants will be extremely small.
Plenty of money in COBOL but there is a need to suit up (physically and mentally) - not for everyone.
I have found a small but significant niche in embedded *nix programming. Small yet powerful systems requiring every scintilla of juice tempered with a familiar API - C Systems programming work is common enough (yet not common enough!). This is where I hope to spend the next while.
An "old school" approach to knowing the architecture inside-out and attention to detail is clouded by the bizarre abstractions of C# and Java. PHP isn't even an abstraction, it's a distraction (I grew tired of the inconsistency so no longer practise).
Perl is unfashionable in some circles and has a reputation for having magic constants (or whatever it is the detractors call "I don't want to learn this language") but I recommend it if you want dynamically typed "chops".
I find these "chops" are overrated. I enjoy low-level thinking so don't need to bloat up with virtual machines[1] (the real ones work fine for me), OO[2] (I know how to pass a pointer to my data to a lib) or design patterns[3] ("ways to do things" - if you learn one way as "the way" you may be unlikely to think there may be a better way)
[1] I use virtual machines but it's perverse running the dozens of MB JVM (and waiting around for it) for a browser bound animation or trivial desktop app. There may be a better case for this messing on the application server, but I don't care.
[2] OK, I will make an argument for OO in GUI programming - a large and complex library of heterogeneous components is difficult to arrange sensibly in a procedural manner. gtk_status_icon_set_from_file(foo_icon, "bar.png") or fooIcon.fileSet("bar.png")? There may be a similar argument to be made for other systems but for the most part I find the OO model a needless abstraction.
[3] Right... most programmers aren't brilliant - I know I'm fucking terrible for the most part - so having established methods for common situations is no bad thing... just don't get too attached.