FlowCharts

[Slamman]

Anyone remember programming classes in the 1980s?

Relate your experience. I even have numerous papers and books, all my old Apple stuff still, There were many programming resources, but you might get a kick out of it. Maximum PC's new issue has a top 25 list of the most GROUND BREAKING machines ever. Starting way back in 1973.

[K^2]

I started taking programming in '92, so I can't really hang with the 80's crowd on this. Machines we were using in our school were from mid 80's, though. So maybe you'll let me post here on that account. They were Yamahas and ran a form of BASIC as an operating system. Monitors with four shades of green, 5" floppys, all that jazz.

 

Flow Charts are universal, though. Even Soviet schools did these. The letters in the boxes were Russian, but that's about all the difference.

[Saggy]

I kind of wish I had started in classes rather than trying to teach myself from books, I can't really do the pseudo code and flowchart practices without adding a level of abstraction that adds more difficulty than there would have been initially. At least that's what my experience in my Intro to C++ was like, problem was everything we were doing was so simple that creating pseudo code for it my as well be the same practice as writing the real code. For example a program that asks a user their name and prints it back to them.

 

The end result is that I have a lot of unconventional ways of doing things and planning programs. I'm probably never going to get a job in the field, but that's all right, it seems to be extremely rigid and inflexible. In fact, once when I did "main(int argc, char **argv)" my instructor chastised me for being a "maverick".

 

 

[trip]

dude, i have got tons of stories about programming in the 80s - i wouldn't even know where to begin.

 

i think it was 87 when i had to take 'intro to systems' as a prereq. the class was basiclly DOS3.1 and we dealt mainly with Lotus123 and DBase. but the best day was when the instructor said 'anyone ever heard of windows?'. so we went to another lab that had color monitors, a mouse, and windows. the mice were great - they were optical but the mouse pad was a vital piece. the mouse pad was like this metal plate with a grid on it - you had to have it oriented correctly.

 

and flow charts - they are still a big part of programming. im a programmer by profession and always work from flow charts provided by the people that ask me to code a production piece of crap.

 

 

[K^2]

I liked DOS. And I liked programming in real mode. I'll take interrupt vectors over OS API any day.

[trip]

 

I liked DOS. And I liked programming in real mode. I'll take interrupt vectors over OS API any day.

those where the days when you trully felt 'in control'.

 

i feel that if you spent time in that world - todays world is way easy. you gained the knowlage of what computers and programming is all about. you learned how everything worked because you had to. you couldn't go to a website and ask how to do something, since there was no internet. you had to learn. you had to read....and you had to understand.

 

all languages pretty much boil down to loops, math and condition statments. just different syntax. now with the internet it is so easy to write in any lang you want. just ask your search engine how to do something.

 

ever since space invaders hit the arcades i have set out to write video games....no sh*t...i spent most of my life writting little crappy games. this is where i love todays world. i have great fun with XNA. in the old days it would take me weeks to knock out a space invaders clone - today with XNA i can knock out a better space invaders clone in a few hours. my wife is a gammer and loves the old sega streets of rage games. she thinks she is blaze. i just started but it shouldn't take me too long to knock out a custome sor/blaze game for her. im using the official sprite sheet for blaze - already looks cool.

 

i'll put my beer down now and stop rambling.

 

 

[K^2]

That's the exact reason I don't like XNA. A lot of people do things without really understanding them. Result is never good. Yes, it saves time, but some things are worth wasting your time on, I believe.

[trip]

That's the exact reason I don't like XNA. A lot of people do things without really understanding them. Result is never good. Yes, it saves time, but some things are worth wasting your time on, I believe.

i hear where you are coming from. i could see people starting with xna and just hacking at code with snippets they get from the internet and so on. i have never looked at anything anyone else has produced in xna(for one i dont own an xbox), but i have to imagine there is a bunch of crap out there.

 

i like it because it takes the hassle out of directX programming. i also like not having to manage timers like the old way.

 

im not one of those microsoft fans, and i'm not usually one to disagree with folks, but 'some things are worth wasting your time on' might not apply fully here. since microsoft is directx i have to think that their libraries to help manage it would be better then the ones i would write.

 

 

just for the record: it took me many years to accept all the new short cut style programming. when visual c first came out i had no clue about the mfc stuff and was still hand coding all of my windows and controls and whatnot.

 

[Saggy]

 

i had no clue about the mfc stuff and was still hand coding all of my windows and controls and whatnot

 

Call me stupid, but I didn't even know about that stuff until I took a C++ class last summer after having fooled around with C for a number of years. My instructor asked why I coded everything in a console, and I said, 'I can't find any documentation for doing the hand coding on the itnernet'.

 

I kind of feel like a perfect example of the type of person that just goes out on the internet to figure out what they need to do, but I still remember days spent stuck on the same page in K&R wondering what in the hell some statement meant beacuse at that time I didn't even have the understanding of computers to comprehend what it meant for the language.

 

 

I don't think I could be a programmer/developer in today's day and age though. A lot of the projects out there baffle me with their size and complexity. For example, ever since I've been getting into Linux, it's awakened my interest in C and I patched a little bug in an application I use. However just reading their documentation for submitting a bug and a patch was way too much for my puny mind. There is so much more going on in programming/developing than just knowing the syntax of a language and basic programming tasks it makes what I know how to do in C seem very laughable.

 

On the other hand, another user simply submitted the patch for me. So I don't know if it's all that much of an amazingly difficult system after all. I guess it just depends on where on the chain you're at.

[xtal256]

all languages pretty much boil down to loops, math and condition statements.

You know, high-level languages like Smalltalk existed back in those days too. The only difference is that back then you had to do low-level programming to get the most out of the hardware. Now it isn't so critical, and as such programmers are concentrating more on high-level design in order to make bigger, more complex programs. There will (probably) always be a hardware limitation of some sort but we will be working on optimising things orders of magnitude greater than saving a few clock cycles per loop or something.

It's important to learn how to do things the right way, but that doesn't mean you have to learn it the hard way.

[K^2]

i like it because it takes the hassle out of directX programming. i also like not having to manage timers like the old way.

 

im not one of those microsoft fans, and i'm not usually one to disagree with folks, but 'some things are worth wasting your time on' might not apply fully here. since microsoft is directx i have to think that their libraries to help manage it would be better then the ones i would write.

That's why I don't use DirectX in the first place. I write with OpenGL and save myself all that trouble. And then I know that my code managing OpenGL calls and is optimized for what I'm doing is far better than generic XNA implements.

 

But yes, if you are writing something that doesn't require a lot of optimization or transparency of code, and you are just doing it for yourself, XNA can be a great tool. What I really take issue with is XNA being developing professional applications, because it invariably results in programmers not having any clue of what's actually going on within the engine. Optimization goes to hell, and general program stability deteriorates.

[trip]

I don't want to say I've gotten lazy, but I guess I have. Maybe it was reading too many articles about how computers have gotten better and faster and we don't need to worry so much about code size and efficiency. Gone are the days of having to write 'tight' - at least that is what they want us to believe

 

Working in a high pressure RAD (get it done now) job doesn't help either. I hate looking back at some of my crap that is running production systems. I always want to rewrite stuff because the shortcuts I had to force usually seem pretty retarded.

 

Laziness does have a price of course. Ever see dotnet just suck through memory for something simple? That microsoft for ya I guess

[aragond]

Anyone remember programming classes in the 1980s?

Relate your experience. I even have numerous papers and books, all my old Apple stuff still, There were many programming resources, but you might get a kick out of it. Maximum PC's new issue has a top 25 list of the most GROUND BREAKING machines ever. Starting way back in 1973.

Dude! You are SOOO f*ckin old skool! Hilarious!

 

Alright, I got the story that should kick all ass bar, I reckon, a dozen people in the whole place... (Well, alright, I'll wait to be surprised)

 

When I started programming, the school was really lucky, 'cuz they'd been able to afford and justify buying a single Apple ][ computer for the math department (Programming? Computer classes? What are they?) but because each class had thirty kids, we couldn't all sit around while one kid did his one-finger-typing for his program on the keyboard, and then the next kid, etc... so, the school bought a CARD READER. We'd be allocated a couple o' dozen cards, you'd pencil in the little <> spaces for each letter, and then you'd line up to feed your program into the computer. Inevitably, everyone had mispencilled, and your program wouldn't parse, so you'd have to sit there reading through the cards to find your error. And it wasn't like the computer would accept one card as a fix -- oh, no, you had to reload it all again.

 

And when you were finally done, had it right, your program would run and display, I dunno, a hundred lines of "Hello World" or some other lame B.S., but, point was, it was programming by card reader. And because we were using BASIC, our cards were numbered, which meant you could (I think) insert them out of order. Mmm, maybe that was later. Anyway, I DO recall having to keep them in order and your hand wound TIGHTLY around them. Any kid decided to knock them out of your hand, and you'd have to reorder eighty cards again.

 

Actually, now that I think about it, my first experience was using card readers in primary/grade school back in 1979 on some mainframe. And they actually expected a more complex program, I think, than school did.

 

Good times. Good times.

 

NEXT awesome programming experience, after all the years fooling about with BASIC and then Fortran, Pascal and... no, don't think I ever learned Cobol (but if you still have the skills, there's a few banks who still use that sh.t!!) ... I finally got down to basics: MACHINE CODE!!! <insert-massive-air-guitar-coolness-here>

 

LOVED that! Finally, I was connecting the dots between the electronics and DOS. (We had to write our own DOS.) And, it was simple. No f*ckin' libraries. No reliance on other peoples' code to know what was going on. Just you and the electronics. Open roads all the way in between.

 

In contrast, thereafter, learning C, much less C++, was a nightmare to me. Why the hell was someone else parsing MY code? And what's with all these libraries? Who the hell knows what they're doing to my Assembler. It wasn't so bad back then (the 80s), but when Microsoft got involved, when libraries and high-level languages became all the rage, when Visual this and Visual that kicked in, I abandoned programming. I am pretty sh*t at it anyway, to be fair.

 

I got roped into doing SQR programming, which was suitably basic. Any dynamic compiler that was less than a MB in size (actually, I don't really recall, but it was small) was good to my mind. It was a small program, an easy program, a basic program. SQL statements and a bunch of text formatting. Simple sh*t. Then I saw some young whipper-snapper produce code about twice as fast as me (I justified myself saying I was more effective with the customer relations), and I abandoned coding again.

 

Until HTML came along. (Alright, it's not a programming language, but it was the first time I was fooling about with "code" in years) And soon after, another "small", "compact" dynamically-compiled (web) programming language appeared in php, so it's my new programming foray. I'm still sh*t at programming, but I manage to build my own CMSs, like for my BUYG novel, relatively easily.

 

But, I still hate libraries. I've gotten used to the php ones. They're okay. They're simple, at least. It's this Microsoft ideal of libraries that rely on libraries that rely on libraries that just... I can't stomach it. You're just begging hackers to bring down your OS.

 

 

I don't want to say I've gotten lazy, but I guess I have.  Maybe it was reading too many articles about how computers have gotten better and faster and we don't need to worry so much about code size and efficiency.  Gone are the days of having to write 'tight' - at least that is what they want us to believe

You're hitting my nail right, square on the head, my friend.

I blame Microsoft, but maybe ... just MAYBE I'll concede they're not the only ones at fault.

 

When I started with computers, the efficiency of your code REALLY mattered. And efficiency meant more than just small code, it meant bug-free code.

 

I worked with one guy who loved telling me about "my generation" and our "fancy" high-level code eeeeeeevery time a bug appeared in our system. He hated it. 'Cuz what could you fix? The error was in some DLL library, one of two hundred, in the system code. All you could do was work around it. Nothing got fixed, he told me, it was all work-arounds. He re-adjusted my view. In his day, he pointed out, you had a bug in the mainframe's program, you rang up the guys at Shell who also used that system, and between yas you'd recode it to fix it and send the fix to everyone who you knew used the system.

 

Now, that's called reverse engineering and gets you jail-time. Back then they were happy you did the fixing. (Which is why this guy is probably a Linux programmer now)

 

I loved Assembler because bugs were REALLY easy to find, and, let's face it, 80% of coding (for me anyway) is finding that f*cking ";" that you misplaced. (Actually, may I say, compilers have gotten REALLY good at error reporting compared to the olden days. PHP tells me "this line's missing an ';'". In days of yore, for the same typo, you'd be told a command fifteen lines further down didn't have the right parameters!!!!)

 

 

 

Working in a high pressure RAD (get it done now) job doesn't help either.  I hate looking back at some of my crap that is running production systems. I always want to rewrite stuff because the shortcuts I had to force usually seem pretty retarded. ... Laziness does have a price of course. Ever see dotnet just suck through memory for something simple?  That microsoft for ya I guess

Alright, I'll return to blaming Microsoft... and Adobe's Macromedia. (Worst invention EVER that Flash thing. STICK TO ADVERTS YOU PIECE OF CRAP!) And, you're absolutely right: the price is that every year or two, your users are upgrading internet bandwidth, memory and browser because web pages ... I mean sh*t a brick, when I was "coding" HTML, it was a 20kb text file. Yes, it was crappy, but it got the information across. Go to, say, CNN.com now and the minimum complete page size will be a MB. WHY do I need all these extra inline elements when all I am really interested in is a page ... with some text ... and a couple o' links? UGH.

 

And then there's RAD. <where's-my-smiley-for-drops-shoulders-and-shakes-head?>

 

Don't get me started on all the new and fancy acronyms that mean nothing but get some consultant paid $2,000 a day to spout them!!

 

<disclaimer> I'm butting heads with this sh*te now. For sixteen years, I worked in the IT industry (kinda) happily picking up new ways of doing things, learning new techniques, watching what was once cowboy-land formalising itself. Now, my years of zero training courses are coming back to roost. All these bloody acronyms for things that I already know. It's like PRINCE 2 (which you Americans might not know about). It's just project management. It's "Have your goals defined" and "Define that you will have weekly progress reports". WhoTF doesn't know to do that? But now I need a piece of paper and a $15,000 course to prove I know to document the testing strategy? But, because I don't, because I've learnt all I know about RAD and Agile SD and Six Sigma and SDLC from Wikipedia (and still roll my f*cking eyes, none of my years in IT apparently count for sh*t.

Now, THAT f*cks me off! </disclaimer>

 

It's not that I can't do these things. It's that the industry has, in its very necessary goal of formalising itself, turned from being 90% coding, 10% fluff into 80% fluff, 20% actual work. I mean, there's acronyms for their acronyms now, and more esoteric terminology that means nothing you didn't already know or couldn't have figured out, but now it's an acronym. And it's the $2,000 a day consultants justifying their existence, and the management, who have never worked in IT except as managers, trying desperately to cap the cost of IT projects which only blow out because they do a Donald Rumsfeld in the first f*cking place!! ("Testing? Who the ... the users will welcome us as liberators!")

</rant>

Hey, feel free to tell me I'm full of it.

 

...

And all that because Slamman asked about when I started with card readers getting the computer to display "hello world" a hundred times on the screen.

Nice question, Slammy.

 

(All I did was come in here to ask about FF3.0's displaying source technique. HA!

[ghost of delete key]

Damn! you guys take me back!

 

My high school had a Prime mainframe (I mentioned it here in this thread) and our computer room looked something like this:

 

 

look at how huge those disks were. That giant machine had something like 128k of RAM.

 

You guys make me feel old.

 

I remember when the Zilog Z80 was a new chip.

I spent endless days breadboarding little machines with those, and 8080A's.

 

I used to hardware-hack arcade machines as well- an outdoor arcade at a batting cage in my neighborhood burned down and I liberated a number of undamaged chassis from the wreckage...

Pac-Man, Frogger, Asteroids... all Z80 machines. The Konami machines were something else though, the CPU was potted in epoxy! But the others were easy to rebuild, and then modify. A homemade EPROM programmer gave the power to create simple pong-like stuff. A full-blown Pac-Man from scratch was a bit beyond my scope at the time, but it was a wonderful education in what was to become what we know as today's PC.