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| Author |
Message |
| 25 new of 124 responses total. |
mynxcat
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response 50 of 124:
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Oct 3 20:28 UTC 2003 |
It depends on what job you're applying for. Contrary to popular
belief, COBOL is still pretty much alive. Every industry has COBOL
embedded somewhere, and it sure doesn't look like it's going to go
away in the near future. Sure, the front ends will change and become
more fancy, but hte actual business functionality is still COBOL. And
what with the fact the old mainframers are going to retire some day,
you'll need people to actually step up and do their jobs.
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tod
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response 51 of 124:
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Oct 3 21:30 UTC 2003 |
This response has been erased.
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cross
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response 52 of 124:
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Oct 3 21:32 UTC 2003 |
This response has been erased.
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gelinas
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response 53 of 124:
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Oct 3 22:13 UTC 2003 |
(Interesting, Dan. I think it belongs in the 'humour' item, though. Maybe.)
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cross
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response 54 of 124:
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Oct 3 23:27 UTC 2003 |
This response has been erased.
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gelinas
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response 55 of 124:
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Oct 4 01:20 UTC 2003 |
Yeah, it belongs here, too. ;/
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sholmes
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response 56 of 124:
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Oct 4 03:58 UTC 2003 |
COBOL was my bread and butter for 3 years ..I liked it ..but then it's not
cool to know program in COBOL anymore :P
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mdw
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response 57 of 124:
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Oct 4 06:02 UTC 2003 |
I don't think cobol and "interested in math" go well together. Cobol
was designed so that you could spell out "difficult" arithmetic so that
your manager could understand it:
ADD A TO B GIVING C.
This is unlikely to impress most math geeks. apl might be more
interesting.
Granted, perl has many warts. It does appear to also be used by
mathematicians for various things, and is in fact a pretty good fit for
the kinds of things many mathematicians do -- in part because it has a
disturbing number of features "borrowed" from lisp and only lightly
disguised. I don't think perl would necessarily be my first choice, but
I don't think it's an automatically bad choice.
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jp2
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response 58 of 124:
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Oct 4 13:42 UTC 2003 |
This response has been erased.
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dah
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response 59 of 124:
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Oct 4 14:47 UTC 2003 |
Python.
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aruba
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response 60 of 124:
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Oct 4 16:05 UTC 2003 |
I think Perl is a terrible choice for a first language. He would never be
able to use anything else.
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asddsa
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response 61 of 124:
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Oct 4 16:08 UTC 2003 |
re 41 WHERE did he say that?
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ea
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response 62 of 124:
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Oct 4 20:53 UTC 2003 |
Lisp or Scheme
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gull
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response 63 of 124:
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Oct 4 21:28 UTC 2003 |
Re #60: I've heard people make the same argument about BASIC.
But yeah, Perl probably isn't structured enough. Perl also has a lot of
"behind the scenes" default actions, like default parameters, that make
it really difficult to read other people's code. That's not good if
you're trying to learn to program.
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aruba
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response 64 of 124:
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Oct 4 21:36 UTC 2003 |
Exactly. Basic at least has the virtue of being a simple language, even if
it's not very structured. So there's only so confusing it can get. Perl
was written for hackers, so it's convoluted and cryptic as all hell.
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jp2
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response 65 of 124:
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Oct 4 23:57 UTC 2003 |
This response has been erased.
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gull
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response 66 of 124:
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Oct 5 00:07 UTC 2003 |
I don't think sed can really be called a programming language.
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mcnally
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response 67 of 124:
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Oct 5 01:22 UTC 2003 |
I agree that Perl would be a bad idea, and especially agree with the
second reason cited in #63. Sometimes it seems like Perl doesn't just
encourage awful programming style, it practically enforces it..
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cross
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response 68 of 124:
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Oct 5 18:26 UTC 2003 |
This response has been erased.
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gull
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response 69 of 124:
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Oct 5 21:01 UTC 2003 |
FORTRAN isn't a bad choice if you plan to go into a science or math
research field.
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gull
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response 70 of 124:
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Oct 5 21:03 UTC 2003 |
Gah. Backtalk is being really flakey today. I keep having to re-enter
my password over and over.
One reservation I have about languages like FORTRAN, COBOL, or Perl is
that I wonder what you can do with them that a kid will find really
interesting. None of them have any graphics capability, for example.
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cross
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response 71 of 124:
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Oct 5 22:39 UTC 2003 |
This response has been erased.
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mynxcat
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response 72 of 124:
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Oct 6 16:33 UTC 2003 |
COBOL does have some graphical capability. At least MF Cobol did. I
was surprised at what cld be done with Cobol when I worked with it.
Sure it's a little cumbersome, but it's still there. (I remember you
can make a bell ding with Cobol, this was when we learnt it back in
college, I know it's not grpahical, but it's still cool)
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remmers
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response 73 of 124:
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Oct 6 16:48 UTC 2003 |
putchar('\007');
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aruba
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response 74 of 124:
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Oct 6 21:14 UTC 2003 |
The first language I learned, when I was 15, was BASIC on my TRS-80 Color
Computer. It had some built-in graphics capability, and as long as you
didn't want anything finer than a 32x64 pixel grid, plotting things was very
easy. So I had a lot of fun, first working through the tutorial book that
came with the computer and then writing stuff on my own. I wrote games and
function-plot programs, mostly. At the end of the BASIC tutorial book was
a bit about assembly language, and descriptions of memory addresses you
could poke to get higher-resolution graphics modes. So eventually I
graduated to writing fancier stuff in BASIC and then Assembler.
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