Posted in IT Pioneers, Still-coding, tagged Coding, History, IT Pioneers, PL/1, Structured design on August 5, 2023| Leave a Comment »
I learned to code in 1963. Things were different then.
There were some obvious things, like 24 hour turnarounds on tests, and storing code on paper tape. Oh – and the computer had about .000000001 of the processor speed on my watch, but at the time we thought it was pretty cool.
I am beginning to sound like one of the four yorkshiremen so I will move on. I want to talk about the pioneers of structured programming and structured design,
(more…)Posted in History, Technology, tagged Coding, javascript, PL/1, typescript on July 2, 2023| Leave a Comment »
Over the years people have developed an unbelievable number of coding languages. They all do pretty much the same job in pretty much the same way. Personally I have coded in Mercury Autocode, COBOL, FORTRAN, PL/1, LISP, Assembler, PERL, basic, C, C++ and JavaScript plus probably some others I have forgotten. Check the list of popular coding languages and you won’t find any of these except C variants and JavaScript1. That is because I have been out of the business for a while and coding languages are items of fashion. Every couple of years a new language becomes the latest hot language. Right now that is Python for reasons that totally escape me.
To make this clear. The world only needs a couple of coding languages, one for regular applications and another (maybe) to write operating systems in. None of the languages for general coding discussed here are a significant improvement on PL/1 which was invented in the 1960s2 , except for support for object orientation, which at the time had not been invented. Had a PL/2 been developed with Objects supported we could all just get on with coding.
But we are where we are.
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Bob Browning's blog 