Saturday, August 8, 2015

Multilingual in the New World

There are many times when I'm busted for not knowing this language or that one as Americans are stupid and only know English.  I'm not even American, I'm just a mutt who happens to be here.

Usually people don't compare notes on computer languages.  Apparently they don't count.

Well, I count quite a few of them.

BASIC -- One of IBM's biggest mistakes was to fail to adequately push forward the BASIC environment
VSBASIC

FORTRAN
WATFOR

COBOL
WATBOL

PL/1
PLC

Motorola 6502 Assembler
IBM 360/370 Assembler
Assembler-H (et al)

C

(more I've forgotten)

Marginal:

DCL (DEC) - I hated it more than most and didn't use it long


Add in scripting languages if you like:

perl
miscellaneous others

and, sure:  LSL (scripting language for SL - hideous but, after perl, you won't mind)


Fully-conversant in all for reading and writing.  Most of them lost my interest over time as the only language with the power for what I was doing was assembler.  Hipsters called it assembly language but they were barely-tolerated even then.

Writing 6502 code was the fastest I ever saw on any platform and it was the tiniest C64 computer.  The assembler only knew three opcodes (i.e. accumulator and two index registers) but the code I wrote was running in-between screen refreshes (i.e. every 1/60th of a second) and you've never seen speed like this.  With big machines, dispatching cycles mean you never get all of the machine's power and the overhead of a mainframe z/OS is enormous.  However, on that C64 you share nothing and you get every cycle it can create.


I'm such a damn illiterate, I can hardly hold my head up.


So, why don't you know any computer languages?

(Ed:  because it's a hassle, analysts are slower than chessmasters but without a fraction of the reliability, DP management has no more imagination than the average earthworm, passive acceptance of management's provincial conservatism may turn you into a serial killer)

Right you are, matey.  Don't do it.

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