From: "Bob McConnell" on
From: Robert Cummings

> On 10-07-29 10:18 PM, David McGlone wrote:
>> On Thu, 2010-07-29 at 22:14 -0400, Robert Cummings wrote:
>>> Early high school I used to program in basic on a TRS-80. Oh how I
loved
>>> saving my programs to audio cassette. Later in high school I learned
>>> pascal and then later qbasic. Later still I studied computer science
and
>>> was exposed to many different languages C, C++, Smalltalk, Java,
>>> Scheme, Prolog, Perl, JavaScript, HTML, VRML, SQL that I remember.
When
>>> I finished university I walked straight into a PHP job knowing not
an
>>> iota of PHP. I came up to speed the first week and fell in love with
it.
>>> That was around March 2000. The company there always used Java also,
as
>>> part of a desktop suite to manage the web content. Towards the end
of
>>> 2002 they began an effort to create a Java based web framework to
>>> parallel their PHP framework and so I used Java more at that time.
Then
>>> the dot com crash caught up with them and layoffs ensued.
>>>
>> What High School did you go to? What year? As far as I remember when
I
>> was in HS, nothing about computers was offered. this was back in '88.
>
> I was attending the Nechako Valley Secondary School in Vanderhoof,
> British Columbia, Canada in 1989 when I was learning Pascal. Now that
I
> think of it more deeply, it wasn't Qbasic in high schoool, it was
Watcom
> Basic while attending Timmins High & Vocational School in Timmins,
> Ontario, Canada in 1990 or 1991. Qbasic was at home :) Actually, I'm
not
> sure about Timmins for the Watcom Basic, it might have been Lockerby
> Composite in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. I attended 4 different high
> schools. Some if it is blurry now :)

The use of Watcom tools would make sense since the Wat was an
abbreviation of Waterloo, Ontario. That was also the source of the
WatFor Fortran compiler I used in 1968.

Bob McConnell
From: Per Jessen on
Bob McConnell wrote:

> From: Per Jessen
>=20
>> Bob McConnell wrote:
>>=20
>>> In chronological order -
>>>=20
>>> Languages: [snip] C++ (Still don't
>>> understand the purpose of objects or classes).
>>=20
>> Two words - encapsulation and abstraction.
>=20
> Both of which are euphemisms that simply mean obfuscation.=20

Certainly not. All structured languages have abstraction and
encapsulation. The minute you write a function or procedure, you are
abstracting and encapsulating. C++ (Smalltalk, Eiffel et al) are just
very focused on those to concepts.=20

> I learned very early in my professional career to eschew obfuscation,=

> so they don't impress me at all. In addition, I really don't do
> abstraction well. I have trouble when I have to deal with more than
> two levels of indirection. Having written and debugged a _lot_ of
> real-time applications and device drivers, in both assembler and C, I=

> am much more comfortable with the concrete, like managing I/O
> registers, interrupt controllers and circular buffers.=20

I used to write system software for StorageTek (HSC, VTCS,
Librarystation), been there, done that. It doesn't mean I can't
appreciate the qualities in encapsulation and abstraction.=20



--=20
Per Jessen, Z=C3=BCrich (20.6=C2=B0C)

From: Bastien Koert on
On Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 5:19 PM, Nathan Rixham <nrixham(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Bastien Koert wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 1:36 AM, Nathan Rixham <nrixham(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi All,
>>>
>>> I find myself wondering about the state of the PHP community (and related
>>> community with a PHP focus), so, here's a bunch of questions - feel free
>>> to
>>> answer none to all of them, on list or off, or add more of your own -
>>> this
>>> isn't for anything specific, just out of interest and sure I (and
>>> everybody
>>> who reads the replies) will learn something + doors/options/contacts may
>>> come of it. The only thing I can guarantee is that I'm genuinely
>>> interested
>>> in every reply and will read every one of them + lookup every tech and
>>> link
>>> mentioned.
>>>
>>> in no particular order:
>>>
>>> What other languages and web techs do you currently use other than PHP?
>>> - if you include html or css please include version, if js then preferred
>>> libs, and whether client or server side.
>>
>> Classic ASP (ugh!)
>
> I'll reply in full shortly when I get a chance, but for now - condolences,
> sincerely - and thanks to the nice dates we currently have I can say:


I give myself condolences every day! ;-)


>
> "wow i remember using classic asp as my primary language a decade ago"
> or:
> "omg I wrote my first news admin system in classic asp at the turn of the
> century"
> or even:
> "omg I remember being stuck with classic asp in the last millenium"!
>
> In all seriousness though:
> 1: how'd you manage to get stuck on classic asp still? maintaining old
> systems that won't shift?

We are stuck for a couple of reasons:
- lack of management vision to move on (one choice might be c# because
"its got the most examples in the msdn pages" is the direct quote)
- long lifecycle of the app (we just got told that we'll need to
support it for the next 3-5 years and they keep selling it!

I am pushing big time to move to php with the CodeIgniter framework
with jQuery. The real trouble is that if we move this way, the VP
won't be in charge because he doesn't have the knowledge to program in
php, not that he's got it in c#!




> 2: has it changed much, if any? (last i used was chillisoft on cobalt
> raq4's!)

Hasn't changed at all in 10 years. MS declared it dead and tried to
turn it off in W2K3 server, but so many legacy apps run on it that it
can't be shut down. It not supported any more and it sucks big time!!!



>
> Best,
>
> Nathan
>



--

Bastien

Cat, the other other white meat
First  |  Prev  | 
Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Prev: Encoding Ampersands
Next: hash problem.