...but it's still quite possible to write readable and modular code even in Fortran 66.
(I'm saying this as a programmer who spent 12 of the past 15 years doing exactly that -- writing and maintaining Fortran 66 code that was part of a critical production system at a major airline).
As with any language, the onus is on the programmer who is writing the code to organize it and implement it in a way which is easy for subsequent programmers to follow and understand.
We were able to do it even within the limits and conventions present in the environment (external variable/parameter references limited to six (6) characters, internal references limited to either five (5) or one (1) character, subroutine names limited to six characters) by using common sense and trying to use a consistent coding style.
Yes, arithmetic IFs are ugly, computed GOTO statements can be confusing, and strings defined using Hollerith notation are strange to folks who haven't seen it before, and programs are hard to follow when everything is lined up neatly in column 7 without any spacing between code and comments. So don't use that style, avoid confusing notation, and refrain from using confusing syntax or statements which might make the intent of the program unclear.
It's the same advice in any languages -- cute tricks might save a few bytes or clock cycles, but in a production environment it's usually long-term MAINTAINABILITY that counts -- and that's true in *any* language!
No. Some emulators (e.g., Vectrex) are allowed.
on
All Emulation is Illegal
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· Score: 2, Informative
The copyright holder for the Vectrex arcade game hardware and the various games which were released on cartridges has explicitly allowed its user community to create emulators for that hardware and run copied images of that software as long as the emulation is not done for profit.
Because of this, Vectrex emulators are perfectly legal, and it is legal to copy the ROM images and play them in a Vectrex emulator on a PC.
...that "Submitting a resume is not a fire and forget action", I found during my lengthy period of unemployment that there were many companies which would provide no contact information at all, and some which explicitly stated that phone calls and other personal solicitations related to the jobs being posted on their web site were strongly discouraged.
In some of those cases I followed up anyway, since I knew something about those companiesor was able to find contact information by other devious means, and in a number of cases I found out they weren't kidding. One guy actually yelled at me for bothering him in his office during business hours, but was a lot more sympathetic when I explained to him why it was that I was going as far as I did to contact him.
I didn't get an interview there, though.:-)
Maybe pissing someone off is a good way to bring attention to yourself, though. That wasn't a tactic I used intentionally.
Post a copy of your most recent resume to a number of major job sites.
That will get your contact information and other relevant things in the hands of people you may not know about who are actively searching for matching applicants online.
Most of the serious interviews that I had during my 32-month unemployment period were initiated by someone else who had seen a copy of my resume on a site like Monster, Dice, America's Job Bank, etc.
Just two cents from someone who has been through this whole process recently (for the second time).
If you don't know the specific environments and tools that they're using, they aren't interested.
I found that a resume that didn't at least mention a list of tools obtained very few responses, and some of the best interviews I had were the result of a specific language or software package I had listed on my resume.
I sent out a fair number of resumes myself (I would guess several hundred) over the past three years, but most of the success I had in getting interviews came from a different source: the copies of my resume that I had posted on various internet job sites.
I still think that actively applying to various positions is better than not sending out resumes at all, since exposure is everything if you're trying to attract attention to yourself, but my own experience that doesn't result in very many positive responses.
I already knew both Integer and Applesoft BASIC and FORTRAN (MUMNF) by the time I graduated from high school in 1981, as well as some bits and pieces of 65C02 assembler, thanks to the fact that the high school I went to in the Twin Cities had Apple II machines in the math department common area as well as in several other areas.
A bunch of us were also exposed to e-mail, real-time chat (DDT, MTC, XTALK, MMT, etc.), interactive multiplayer text games (including KARNATH and MU,CCOMBAT,USMK031 - thanks Clay!), and so on through the MECC Timesharing System. There were a pair of TTY 33's sitting in a soundproof booth in the high school math department, and some of us spent more time in there than we probably should have.
They also offered a BASIC programming class when I was a senior, so I was able to get a little bit of semi-formal training in spaghetti-code avoidance before going off to college and getting my BSCS.
Not quite the same as typing classes in grade school, but I still had considerable exposure before college.
The routine above invokes the BT (Block Transfer) instruction on the mainframe its compiled on, BTW, which is optimized for mass storage buffer transfers and is *lightning* fast...
I just went through a lengthy layoff myself, but as you say, if there's something you love to do, it's gonna take a lot more than a couple of years without a decent paycheck to keep a person from trying to do it again.:-)
Whether or not you can "make a living" at it depends on a number of things, I think. Location and luck are two of them. Your standard of living might be another. I bought a house almost exactly a year before I was laid off and got married over a year AFTER I was laid off, and yet I still own a house and am happily married, so those two things are possible even while being an *unemployed* programmer. Just a little more challenging at times, that's all.
I also think both having a dream job and living the proverbial American Dream is possible, but it isn't necessarily going to come to you on a silver platter.
I had my dream job and I lost it, but I found another one after almost three years which comes damn close to what I had before. Some things are worse, some better. I had to move across the country away from family, etc. But I'm still writing code, still able to support my PC-fiddling and DVD-watching habits, and still living with a wonderful woman.
Hopefully I'll have a few years here so I can recover and prepate myself for the next layoff.:-) (I've had two so far during my career).
More specifically, I still love working as a programmer/analyst where I can do everything from collaborative design work to writing and debugging code to supporting the live application when it's "done" and running in production. Even writing documentation can be fun... sometimes.
There isn't quite as much design work at this job as there was at my last, but that's the nature of multi-vendor software work when you're using someone else's interface specs much of the time.
The fact that I can create things and put them out there on a corporate system for thousands of people to use (and sometimes even depend on) still fascinates me, though. It still makes me happy to finish a project, still makes me a little nervous to cut something over on a live system for the first time, and still feels VERY SATISFYING when I finally find and **SQUASH** the damned bug that's been making my code look bad over the past couple of days... Grumble, grumble.
If you love programming, don't worry. While I suppose there are boring positions out there where little independent thought is needed, it's been my experience that there are a lot of better ones as well. And if the work is boring, find a way to channel your energies into side projects that aren't so boring. There's always something interesting that needs to be worked on...
If I need more flexible software in some context, I might choose to use a non-commercial version of that software and either support it myself or contract out the support to a third party.
There's absolutely no reason why a commercial costumer can't mix and match the two. That's why I said that the presence of commercial distributions provides more options, not fewer. The original set of options still exists.
MS is hiring Program Managers fresh out of school?
on
Defining Google
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· Score: 1
Some examples I've experienced within the past two years:
* Local Contract job: one phone interview with recruiter, one in-person interview with the manager and lead programmer, was told I had the job before I left. Quick and concise. I enjoyed my time there, too.
* Non-Local Contract job: four phone interviews (with the recruiter, with HR, with the hiring manager, and a conference call with the team), and then budget changes eliminated the open position before they scheduled the in-person interviews. Oops!
* Non-Local Permanent job: three phone interviews (with the potential teammate who recruited me, the hiring manager, and HR), and two in-person interviews after they flew me across the country (with the manager and in round-robin format with the entire team around a table). I think I would have gotten this one, but the next one came up and moved more quickly (and was a better fit for me in many ways) so I chose it before this one completed their lengthy "evaluation" process:
* Non-Local Permanent job: two phone interviews (with the recruiter, and with the hiring manager), and two in-person interviews the following week after they flew me across the country (with the hiring manager and with HR). I think I'd rather work here than at Google, too.:-)
For such a bold, innovative company...
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 1
...they sure seem to have a hard time creating bold, innovative software...
I've seen CIOs and VPs of IS do extremely stupid and/or damaging things to the departments they were in charge of and then leave the company with more laurels danging from their CVs.
It doesn't seem to matter that the real-world impact of their actions and policy decisions actually hurt the company.
Very frustrating to see this at multiple companies and (in some cases) multiple times at one company.
Unless there's a late-release unit that I'm unaware of, in which case I will sit corrected, no Socket 8 Pentium Pro supported the MMX instruction set at all. Their release predated MMX.
I own seven PPro boxes myself, most of them with stepping level 7 or 9 CPUs, and one with a PII/333 OverDrive chip installed.
It's fairly trivial to demonstrate that MMX instructions are not present -- almost any CPU identification software will test for that, and the one Linux game I've been interested in which has a hard MMX requirement will fail to run on all of my PPro boxes except the one with the OverDrive.
I suspect you either misunderstand the issue being talked about or are actually using a chip which is not a Pentium Pro CPU. An older PII, perhaps?
However, if a better design could be submitted to Microsoft for their own system (based on an outsider's view of their own code), then both Microsoft and their customer base could derive benefit.
It certainly has been on the big iron I've played with over the years. Why can't Unix do the same?
There are many reasons why some classes of businesses continue to use mainframes heavily, and a lack of robustness on the operating system level is a very large part of the reason. It ain't all about CPU, folks...
Some Unix people really *do* need to learn from non-Unix computing history, at least in this programmer's opinion...
Slashdot Mirror
We're still using F77 here, so I didn't know that. :-)
/* comment notation */ are two things about C that I've never quite understood...
:-)
That and C's strange
Maybe I've been using too many non-C-like languages for my own good.
A Fortran logical equivalence comparison and variable assignment:
.EQ. B
:-)
A
A = B
A C logical equivalence comparison and variable assignment:
A == B
A = B
Guess which language is more susceptible to subtle typos which can radically change the behavior of the program?
...but it's still quite possible to write readable and modular code even in Fortran 66.
(I'm saying this as a programmer who spent 12 of the past 15 years doing exactly that -- writing and maintaining Fortran 66 code that was part of a critical production system at a major airline).
As with any language, the onus is on the programmer who is writing the code to organize it and implement it in a way which is easy for subsequent programmers to follow and understand.
We were able to do it even within the limits and conventions present in the environment (external variable/parameter references limited to six (6) characters, internal references limited to either five (5) or one (1) character, subroutine names limited to six characters) by using common sense and trying to use a consistent coding style.
Yes, arithmetic IFs are ugly, computed GOTO statements can be confusing, and strings defined using Hollerith notation are strange to folks who haven't seen it before, and programs are hard to follow when everything is lined up neatly in column 7 without any spacing between code and comments. So don't use that style, avoid confusing notation, and refrain from using confusing syntax or statements which might make the intent of the program unclear.
It's the same advice in any languages -- cute tricks might save a few bytes or clock cycles, but in a production environment it's usually long-term MAINTAINABILITY that counts -- and that's true in *any* language!
The copyright holder for the Vectrex arcade game hardware and the various games which were released on cartridges has explicitly allowed its user community to create emulators for that hardware and run copied images of that software as long as the emulation is not done for profit.
Because of this, Vectrex emulators are perfectly legal, and it is legal to copy the ROM images and play them in a Vectrex emulator on a PC.
Actually, I think you can, at least for your own use. You just can't release the end result unless that end result is also released under the GPL.
...that "Submitting a resume is not a fire and forget action", I found during my lengthy period of unemployment that there were many companies which would provide no contact information at all, and some which explicitly stated that phone calls and other personal solicitations related to the jobs being posted on their web site were strongly discouraged.
:-)
In some of those cases I followed up anyway, since I knew something about those companiesor was able to find contact information by other devious means, and in a number of cases I found out they weren't kidding. One guy actually yelled at me for bothering him in his office during business hours, but was a lot more sympathetic when I explained to him why it was that I was going as far as I did to contact him.
I didn't get an interview there, though.
Maybe pissing someone off is a good way to bring attention to yourself, though. That wasn't a tactic I used intentionally.
Post a copy of your most recent resume to a number of major job sites.
That will get your contact information and other relevant things in the hands of people you may not know about who are actively searching for matching applicants online.
Most of the serious interviews that I had during my 32-month unemployment period were initiated by someone else who had seen a copy of my resume on a site like Monster, Dice, America's Job Bank, etc.
Just two cents from someone who has been through this whole process recently (for the second time).
If you don't know the specific environments and tools that they're using, they aren't interested.
I found that a resume that didn't at least mention a list of tools obtained very few responses, and some of the best interviews I had were the result of a specific language or software package I had listed on my resume.
I sent out a fair number of resumes myself (I would guess several hundred) over the past three years, but most of the success I had in getting interviews came from a different source: the copies of my resume that I had posted on various internet job sites.
I still think that actively applying to various positions is better than not sending out resumes at all, since exposure is everything if you're trying to attract attention to yourself, but my own experience that doesn't result in very many positive responses.
I already knew both Integer and Applesoft BASIC and FORTRAN (MUMNF) by the time I graduated from high school in 1981, as well as some bits and pieces of 65C02 assembler, thanks to the fact that the high school I went to in the Twin Cities had Apple II machines in the math department common area as well as in several other areas.
A bunch of us were also exposed to e-mail, real-time chat (DDT, MTC, XTALK, MMT, etc.), interactive multiplayer text games (including KARNATH and MU,CCOMBAT,USMK031 - thanks Clay!), and so on through the MECC Timesharing System. There were a pair of TTY 33's sitting in a soundproof booth in the high school math department, and some of us spent more time in there than we probably should have.
They also offered a BASIC programming class when I was a senior, so I was able to get a little bit of semi-formal training in spaghetti-code avoidance before going off to college and getting my BSCS.
Not quite the same as typing classes in grade school, but I still had considerable exposure before college.
I'd prefer something like this:
:-)
CALL BLKTRA(INBUF,OUTBUF,NUMCH)
but I'm an old Fortran fogey.
The routine above invokes the BT (Block Transfer) instruction on the mainframe its compiled on, BTW, which is optimized for mass storage buffer transfers and is *lightning* fast...
I just went through a lengthy layoff myself, but as you say, if there's something you love to do, it's gonna take a lot more than a couple of years without a decent paycheck to keep a person from trying to do it again. :-)
:-) (I've had two so far during my career).
Whether or not you can "make a living" at it depends on a number of things, I think. Location and luck are two of them. Your standard of living might be another. I bought a house almost exactly a year before I was laid off and got married over a year AFTER I was laid off, and yet I still own a house and am happily married, so those two things are possible even while being an *unemployed* programmer. Just a little more challenging at times, that's all.
I also think both having a dream job and living the proverbial American Dream is possible, but it isn't necessarily going to come to you on a silver platter.
I had my dream job and I lost it, but I found another one after almost three years which comes damn close to what I had before. Some things are worse, some better. I had to move across the country away from family, etc. But I'm still writing code, still able to support my PC-fiddling and DVD-watching habits, and still living with a wonderful woman.
Hopefully I'll have a few years here so I can recover and prepate myself for the next layoff.
More specifically, I still love working as a programmer/analyst where I can do everything from collaborative design work to writing and debugging code to supporting the live application when it's "done" and running in production. Even writing documentation can be fun ... sometimes.
There isn't quite as much design work at this job as there was at my last, but that's the nature of multi-vendor software work when you're using someone else's interface specs much of the time.
The fact that I can create things and put them out there on a corporate system for thousands of people to use (and sometimes even depend on) still fascinates me, though. It still makes me happy to finish a project, still makes me a little nervous to cut something over on a live system for the first time, and still feels VERY SATISFYING when I finally find and **SQUASH** the damned bug that's been making my code look bad over the past couple of days... Grumble, grumble.
If you love programming, don't worry. While I suppose there are boring positions out there where little independent thought is needed, it's been my experience that there are a lot of better ones as well. And if the work is boring, find a way to channel your energies into side projects that aren't so boring. There's always something interesting that needs to be worked on...
Although one could certainly use open source software as part of a "costuming" business if one wishes... :-)
It isn't an either-or situation.
If I need more flexible software in some context, I might choose to use a non-commercial version of that software and either support it myself or contract out the support to a third party.
There's absolutely no reason why a commercial costumer can't mix and match the two. That's why I said that the presence of commercial distributions provides more options, not fewer. The original set of options still exists.
*That* explains some things! :-)
Some examples I've experienced within the past two years:
:-)
* Local Contract job: one phone interview with recruiter, one in-person interview with the manager and lead programmer, was told I had the job before I left. Quick and concise. I enjoyed my time there, too.
* Non-Local Contract job: four phone interviews (with the recruiter, with HR, with the hiring manager, and a conference call with the team), and then budget changes eliminated the open position before they scheduled the in-person interviews. Oops!
* Non-Local Permanent job: three phone interviews (with the potential teammate who recruited me, the hiring manager, and HR), and two in-person interviews after they flew me across the country (with the manager and in round-robin format with the entire team around a table). I think I would have gotten this one, but the next one came up and moved more quickly (and was a better fit for me in many ways) so I chose it before this one completed their lengthy "evaluation" process:
* Non-Local Permanent job: two phone interviews (with the recruiter, and with the hiring manager), and two in-person interviews the following week after they flew me across the country (with the hiring manager and with HR). I think I'd rather work here than at Google, too.
...they sure seem to have a hard time creating bold, innovative software...
I've seen CIOs and VPs of IS do extremely stupid and/or damaging things to the departments they were in charge of and then leave the company with more laurels danging from their CVs.
It doesn't seem to matter that the real-world impact of their actions and policy decisions actually hurt the company.
Very frustrating to see this at multiple companies and (in some cases) multiple times at one company.
...in places that actually get snow, imagine the effort needed to keep such a roadway clear.
:-)
Unless some sort of built-in de-icing system is part of the plan?
Unless there's a late-release unit that I'm unaware of, in which case I will sit corrected, no Socket 8 Pentium Pro supported the MMX instruction set at all. Their release predated MMX.
I own seven PPro boxes myself, most of them with stepping level 7 or 9 CPUs, and one with a PII/333 OverDrive chip installed.
It's fairly trivial to demonstrate that MMX instructions are not present -- almost any CPU identification software will test for that, and the one Linux game I've been interested in which has a hard MMX requirement will fail to run on all of my PPro boxes except the one with the OverDrive.
I suspect you either misunderstand the issue being talked about or are actually using a chip which is not a Pentium Pro CPU. An older PII, perhaps?
If you installed Intel's PII Overdrive for Socket 8 mommyboard you could obtain MMX, but that was the only way.
While I agree with you, the logical connection that Microsoft is trying to make simply does not exist...
However, if a better design could be submitted to Microsoft for their own system (based on an outsider's view of their own code), then both Microsoft and their customer base could derive benefit.
It certainly has been on the big iron I've played with over the years. Why can't Unix do the same?
There are many reasons why some classes of businesses continue to use mainframes heavily, and a lack of robustness on the operating system level is a very large part of the reason. It ain't all about CPU, folks...
Some Unix people really *do* need to learn from non-Unix computing history, at least in this programmer's opinion...