[LINK] Basic Turns Sixty

[Roger Clarke]

> On 2/05/2024 8:17 pm, Stephen Loosley wrote: 
>> Sixty years ago, on May 1, 1964, at 4 am in the morning, a quiet 
>> revolution in computing began at Dartmouth College. That's when 
>> mathematicians John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz successfully ran the 
>> first program written in their newly developed BASIC (Beginner's 
>> All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) programming language on the 
>> college's General Electric GE-225 mainframe.
>>
>> Little did they know that their creation would go on to democratize 
>> computing and inspire generations of programmers over the next six 
>> decades.


On 3/5/2024 10:53, David wrote:
> God I feel old sometimes, but then...

Don't feel lonely - there are a few of us on link  (:-)}

David, others:  Serious question arising from your further comments.

Back in the day, the concept of a 'superprogrammer' was used, in all 
earnestness, to try to generalise on some big project successes.

When the smoke had cleared a decade later, the consensus was that it was 
an excellent idea, and that the number of people in the world who had 
the necessary characteristics to be a superprogrammer numbered 10 +/- 2.

I'm a (moderately) skilled procedural-language programmer, who lived and 
contributed through the 'structured' era, during which we basically 
developed a bunch of tools, techniques and training which ensured that 
bad COBOL/Fortran/etc. practices and products were overcome, and good 
ones became the norm.  Loop-control, use (and documentation and 
maintenance) of subroutines (by whatever name), generalised data-item 
definition, the completeness of exception-handling, are among many 
examples of 'good'.

As OO came along, I admired the people who had, and applied, the logic 
and engineering mindset to use the languages properly.

And I rapidly came to the conclusion that the number of people in the 
world who had the necessary characteristics to be OO programmers 
numbered way more than the number of superprogrammers, but way fewer 
than the number that we needed, and way fewer than the number of people 
who, one way or another, write in (at least partially) OO languages.

And I can see little evidence of tools, techniques and training that 
overcome bad, and ensure good, practices and products.

(For one thing, supervision and management of software dev has been very 
thin on the ground, partly because it's not easy, but not least because 
it's expensive, and quality isn't valued).

David, others, how do you see the scene?

You might want to differentiate between the proportion of software that 
is developed within a software engineering context, and the rest ...

Thanks!  ...  Roger

___________________


> I've seen some terrible programming efforts by "democratized" 
> programmers (even professional engineers back then) who seemed stuck in 
> the step-by-step computing process, apparently unable to abstract it 
> even to the level of indexed loops, variables which could cause 
> divide-by-zero or overflow exceptions, and generalised subroutines.
> 
> It's not entirely a 1960's or 1980's issue either.  I've noticed some 
> 21st-century software-engineering students seem to have trouble grasping 
> the concept of object-oriented programming. Supposedly OO software 
> sometimes include some form of "control program" which effectively 
> duplicates functions performed by the OO language, but badly.
> 
> Interestingly, Fortran IV seems to have evolved as a modern language, 
> perhaps because of its wide use in areas such as weather modelling.  
> It's fully parallel, supports OO programming, etc. The latest version is 
> Fortran 2023 (try telling that to a SWE class :-) - see 
> https://fortran-lang.org/ <https://fortran-lang.org/> - and I think most 
> Linux distributions include an earlier version.
> 
> One wonders what DIY AI will bring...
> 
> _David Lochrin_
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-- 
Roger Clarke                            mailto:Roger.Clarke at xamax.com.au
T: +61 2 6288 6916   http://www.xamax.com.au  http://www.rogerclarke.com

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Visiting Professorial Fellow                          UNSW Law & Justice
Visiting Professor in Computer Science    Australian National University