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[JimOttley]

i think you said you was a s/w developer jim, what languages do you program in ?

Loads Joe

Worked with Clipper and C in the 80's, C++ occasionally but only when I really have to, mostly for embedded stuff in handheld devices like barcode readers or when I have to write special interfaces.

Visual Basic from version 2 onwards, god I hate that language

Something called Visual Objects, nice language but it went nowhere.

Object Pascal i.e. Delphi was my preferred development tool for long time, still supporting a large Delphi code base these days and probably will be for a good long time to come.

Last few years I made the switch to C# and the .NET framework, C# is a very nice language it has all the elegance and expressivness of Delphi's Object Pascal but it's modern, really like it these days.

Now it's often more about knowing technologies than about languages, with .NET you can code in the dialect that you feel comfortable in be it VB, Pascal or C/C++/C# style they all compile down to the same intermediate language.

No these days it's more about technologies, platforms and design patterns things like WPF, Silverlight, WCF, MVC/MVP (Model View Controller/Presenter patterns) .

Window Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Windows Communications Foundation (WCF) are the main things I'm working with now.

I do some web development too but it's not really what I enjoy, I much prefer working on Line of Business apps.

On the data side mostly SQL Server these days but I also worked a lot with Oracle and we still use the Btrieve database system now known as Pervasive SQL.

It's all great fun and I do enjoy learning new stuff but sometimes I wish it would all stop changing even just for a little while


Jim

[joebloggs]

i see things have moved on slightly since the days I learnt cobol

and i couldn't get my head around object programming, harder when you learnt structured programming techniques like jsp. - thou probably good for visual basic

as for sql, i still cant understand the normal forms of normalization, sql theory most boring subject known to mankind

as for the rest, you've lost me

assembly language was my fave, fast and pure, just you and the processor , the stuff you could do in a few bytes

wish i stuck at it, how i miss the days of 3.5k of ram to use

thou i always wanted to learn and use C#

[JimOttley]

i see things have moved on slightly since the days I learnt cobol

and i couldn't get my head around object programming, harder when you learnt structured programming techniques like jsp. - thou probably good for visual basic

as for sql, i still cant understand the normal forms of normalization, sql theory most boring subject known to mankind

as for the rest, you've lost me

assembly language was my fave, fast and pure, just you and the processor , the stuff you could do in a few bytes

wish i stuck at it, how i miss the days of 3.5k of ram to use

thou i always wanted to learn and use C#

My colleagues still use a dialect of Cobol a lot of my stuff is built around their core Cobol ERP system, I added Document Management, Radio Frequency Barcode scanners etc.

I've never really coded in assembler although oddly enough I dug out one of my books on assembly language last night

As you say just you and the processor but you have to know the processor intimately

As for SQL, I bet you worked with normalised data all the time mate but I know what you mean.

WPF = scale independant vector graphics user interface for line of business apps, you get to use the graphics processor at something more than 0.1% of it's capability.

WCF = Microsoft's latest attempt to implement a multi-tier architecture it basically provides yet another way of doing remote procedure calls. This time over the web.

WPF + WCF = Presentation separated from business logic separated from database.

Until recently VB was a pseudo object language that was partly why I hated it , the other reason was it was just to easy to shoot yourself in the foot using VB

Object orientation is just good practice not that different from structured techniques, once you get your head round the idea of "object instances" i.e. discrete block of data with code that acts on that block of data, it all gets pretty simple. Lots of old Cobol coders used to use techniques that were as close as you could get to object programming in a procedural language it was natural to them, they were really not that far removed from the modern programming world.

Amazing when you think back, whole operating systems running in a few kilobytes in the old days

Also amazing is the fact that almost all the new stuff that is coming out now is a rehash of stuff that was done long long ago on a faraway mainframe, very little is really ground breaking in modern computing


Jim

[joebloggs]

I used to use Prolog in the 80's, and machine code on CPM systems That's going back a bit!

I've still got a rair black box, cpm puter from about 1980, i've not turned it on since about 1981 - its got a 5mb hdd

The boards on this model would sometimes come free from the mother board during transit. The engineer would arrive from Rair, wait for the client to leave the room, and then simply drop the computer from about two inches off the desk to re-install the system.

http://www.old-computers.com/MUSEUM/computer.asp?c=454

yes 8085 processor.

I've never really coded in assembler although oddly enough I dug out one of my books on assembly language last night

As you say just you and the processor but you have to know the processor intimately

As for SQL, I bet you worked with normalised data all the time mate but I know what you mean.

i knew and still know the 6502 and z80 instruction set more intimately than the misses and thats more than 25yrs ago



sql theory is the only thing i took twice and gave up twice on , some times you need to know when to quit