[Newspoetry] Re: Y2K in the Eyes of a Programmer (fwd)

[Paul Kotheimer]

hey y'all

here's a response to Bill's Y2K/Programmer piece from my dad, who
programmed in the ancient languages from 1979 until his retirement in the
mid-90's.  

he unfortunately suffers a mean case of arthritis connected with ergonomic
injuries sustained in that score or so of years.  so code-crunchers
beware!

paul

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 02 Jan 2000 14:59:01 -0600
From: Rich Kotheimer <rkotheimer at niia.net>
To: Paul Kotheimer <herringb at prairienet.org>
Subject: Re: Y2K in the Eyes of a Programmer



Paul Kotheimer wrote:

> hey dad
>
> here's something funny from NewsPoetry.com's resident LINUX warrior, Bill
> Wendling:
>
> paul
> ***********************************
> Interesting that another generation still remembers Cobal.  I once could do
> it

with my eyes shut but I always wonderd about saving a few bits and bytes for
the hundreds and thousandths unit in the year.  Those bytes came back to bite
us!!
   The complaints of users not appreciating the programmers work we always
attributed to the users failure to understand the limitations of the program
and
failure to communicate what they really wanted the program to do. (garbage in
garbage out.)  Users often think the computer should know what they want not
understanding there has to be a person interpolating between their fingers
and the the ones and zeros running the she/he bang.
    Besides Cobal there was Fortran, ADA, Pascal, Basic, Assembler and
Machine
Code all dinosaurs by now as unfortunately I too have fossilized.
     Did enjoy the piece...................Dad