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Funny Stuff: A New Hope


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3 hours ago, rjshae said:

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Good time to know COBOL. Guess sometimes "It works" needs to be measured against "We can maintain it"

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Why has elegance found so little following? Elegance has the disadvantage that hard work is needed to achieve it and a good education to appreciate it. - Edsger Wybe Dijkstra

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"While it is true you learn with age, the down side is what you often learn is what a damn fool you were before"

Thomas Sowell

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4 hours ago, Malcador said:

Good time to know COBOL. Guess sometimes "It works" needs to be measured against "We can maintain it"

Our school had a leftover Siemens server with BS2000 on it. So happily we set off learning that the single best way to crush the hopes and dreams of any 14 year old who really wants to learn how to make software is being taught how to do that on a mainframe operating system in COBOL. I swore to myself that I never will do that for a living, and look at me now, almost 25 years later I'm doing the next "best" thing, working as ERP dev. I guess I can say at least it's not SAP, right? That's got to be worth something. Right?

DISPLAY "Ain't all bad though, I get to crack jokes with one of our developers at work because... well, because our old warehouse management software was actually developed in COBOL. Yeah, it's a bit, say, outdated but still in use." UPON TERMINAL

STOP RUN. ;)

Oi, and one valuable lesson that I've learned was that some teachers are just bastards who revel in being unfair and soul crushing. We had one of them horrible witches. She actually stood there and said something like "A good developer knows the intricacies of the language they're using" and I did just that for an exam we had.

COBOL is a bit verbose. And by a bit I mean it's literally like writing an essay. All commands are written in plain old English. Except for exentions to the language that were made with quality of life in mind. To be honest I have no idea how modern COBOL looks like, what we learned was COBOL-80, and that came out, you guessed right, in 1980.

So anyway, what we had to do among other things was doing some typical school stuff, changing units of measurement from one into another. Temperatures, as it were, that's one of the basics right after Hello, World!.

In quite frankly any other iterative language you'd just write F = C * 5 / 9 + 32 to convert a proper temperature scale into something completely random and silly and be done with it. Not so in COBOL, nah. That would look like:

MULTIPLY C by 5 GIVING C

DIVIDE C by 9 GIVING C

ADD 32 TO C GIVING F

DISPLAY F UPON TERMINAL

Or of course you could read the language documentation and find out that someone in the past noticed that this is ridiculous and added a COMPUTE statement. So what did I, knower of intricacies do? Of course:

COMPUTE F = C * 5 / 9 + 32.

(Notice that . there. It's necessary for COMPUTE but not for the other statements. Now that's a WHOLE OTHER can of worms).

Yeah, so that test, guess what? Failed it. I should have demonstrated my knowledge of basic COBOL verbs, not the intricacies of the language.

Silly me.

Edited by majestic
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No mind to think. No will to break. No voice to cry suffering.

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The words freedom and liberty, are diminishing the true meaning of the abstract concept they try to explain. The true nature of freedom is such, that the human mind is unable to comprehend it, so we make a cage and name it freedom in order to give a tangible meaning to what we dont understand, just as our ancestors made gods like Thor or Zeus to explain thunder.

 

-Teknoman2-

What? You thought it was a quote from some well known wise guy from the past?

 

Stupidity leads to willful ignorance - willful ignorance leads to hope - hope leads to sex - and that is how a new generation of fools is born!


We are hardcore role players... When we go to bed with a girl, we roll a D20 to see if we hit the target and a D6 to see how much penetration damage we did.

 

Modern democracy is: the sheep voting for which dog will be the shepherd's right hand.

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Morgan Everett's getting...desperate.  Your turn.

 

 

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Why has elegance found so little following? Elegance has the disadvantage that hard work is needed to achieve it and a good education to appreciate it. - Edsger Wybe Dijkstra

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