10 ms·

We probably are close to the same age. My dad was an engineer who also learned to program FORTRAN in the 70's. When I asked him a similar question his reply w

We probably are close to the same age. My dad was an engineer who also learned to program FORTRAN in the 70's. When I asked him a similar question his reply was (quotes are paraphrased): "It was way too tedious to do. You'd spend hours getting the cards just right. We used to put them in a shoebox and mark them with a pen in case we dropped them on the way to the lab. Then you'd wait until the next day to get your results. If you had a mistake you'd repeat the whole process". Basically it was considered tedious, grunt work in his opinion (at the time...he later of course has come to understand the importance).

smcameron 4y ago
I remember going off to college in 1986, and thinking I might major in computer science, and my dad told me, "anyone can learn to program computers, you might be better off with EE." To be fair, at the time, anyone could learn to program computers (and it's probably still true) -- my dad was doing it, and his major was chemistry -- and really, anyone that's really good at programming computers is necessarily self-taught to a great extent. You just don't become a great programmer by dint of tutoring. Anyway, I stayed in EE for a year, then switched my major to computer science with a minor in EE, and no regrets.
brailsafe 4y ago
It's still tedious grunt work
marcodiego 4y ago
This is something my father told me too. He said he spent some time writing the code on paper, thinking a lot about it; then when he was somewhat sure about what he had written it was time to punch the cards. He used to leave the batch on Friday and went back on Monday to ask the "computer operator" about results and sometimes the result was "syntax error on line 1."
lambdasquirrel 4y ago
> "I didn't thought this thing about computers would go too far." I almost didn't major in Computer Science because in the late 90s, there were so many negative articles in the New York Times, vis-a-vis software. People don't remember it now, but the media and the culture were utterly hostile towards us, and loved to say our jobs were going to India, that everything there was to know about Computer Science could be studied in railyard switching, in existing abstract math textbooks, etc. By a combination of luck, and my dad's insistence, I ended up at Carnegie Mellon, and while I was there, I saw what folks at Google were doing, and I thought to myself, no, this stuff is hard, and this is just going to be the beginning. > "It was way too tedious to do. You'd spend hours getting the cards just right. We used to put them in a shoebox and mark them with a pen in case we dropped them on the way to the lab. Then you'd wait until the next day to get your results. If you had a mistake you'd repeat the whole process" Even what came after that, e.g. in C / C++ was considerably tedious compared to what we do today. Folks sometimes had to do objdumps of compiled binaries to debug what was going on. We had to get coredumps, load them up, and try to determine what memory error had caused things to crash (this is an entire class of problems that doesn't exist today). You used to legit need that CS degree in order to code in your day-to-day because you had to understand the function stack, the network stack, basic syscalls like wait and poll, etc. It was a lot of work, for relatively little product, and I think part of the reason why software is paid more today is in part because of 1. faster processing speeds and 2. better tooling and automation, and higher-level programming languages – all of which were enabled in part by cheaper / faster CPU speeds (e.g. people don't have to care about how slow Python is – you can optimize it after you find product-market-fit), and 3. a better understanding of how software should be developed, at all levels of management.
- telcal 4y ago
  I majored in Computer Science in the late 90s and honestly don't remember any of what you're saying regarding negative/hostile media. To me it felt like a golden age. The .com bust hadn't happened yet. If you could turn a computer on there were jobs everywhere. The world was starting to get online. Linux was really gaining traction and Slashdot was all time.
- smcameron 4y ago
  > Even what came after that, e.g. in C / C++ was considerably tedious compared to what we do today. Folks sometimes had to do objdumps of compiled binaries to debug what was going on. They used to do objdumps. They still do, but they used to too.
- wilsynet 4y ago
  I majored in CS in the late 90s and this wasn’t my experience at all. The Netscape IPO happened in 1995, followed by 5 years of the dot.com gold rush. Computers flew off the shelves, and everyone wanted to get online. The dotcom crash happens later in 2001, but if we are talking about the late 90s, then I’d say it was a period of huge energy in the CS field and tech companies were hiring as fast as they could and jobs were plentiful all around.
- nb1987 4y ago
  I was in high school in the early 00s and heard the exact same thing, and that was a major reason why I chose not to major in CS! (The other is that my HS programming curriculum and teacher were inadequate, but at the time I was convinced that I just wasn't wired for programming.) In the end I took the long way around and ended up in the field as a self-taught programmer.
- _glass 4y ago
  When I started uni in 2004 it was still like this. I kind of was ashamed at parties to tell what I study, not to come off as too nerdy. I did a double major, so business was hipper. Just imagine! The status of developers changed so much in two decades. Nowadays people are impressed. And even in my career I see the difference. Not so many VPNs anymore, the move to the cloud made everything much easier.
drittich 4y ago
This is exactly how I first learned to program. Waiting a whole day to find out you had a bug was just way too frustrating for me so I completely wrote it off, as much as I enjoyed writing code. Once the first PCs came on the scene, though, everything changed and I was all over it. Still am.
spaetzleesser 4y ago
I enjoyed programming in the 90s and early 2000s but I feel it’s turning again into tedious grunt work with scrum, agile, yaml configuration files and needlessly complex systems.
- switchbak 4y ago
  If you really find the agile processes you're using are adding tedium, why don't you do the agile thing and tailor them to your specific context? But I imagine we're probably using the same word to describe very different things.
  - spaetzleesser 4y ago
    The current implementation of Agile in most cases is pretty much the opposite of agile as described in the agile manifesto. In my team we have reduced the process to having a simple backlog which we work through. But I have seen other teams where you spend enormous amounts of time on planning but it’s frowned upon if you think any further than the next sprint. Just check off tasks without any thoughts about long term architecture or strategy. Basically just a sweatshop with replaceable “resources” (the company doesn’t hire “people” anymore but “resources”)
    - switchbak 4y ago
      There is no current implementation of Agile though, Agile was an umbrella term for a variety of different practices. I don't think you can blame it if it's been poorly implemented. Granted, that is most of what I see: poorly implemented agile everywhere, usually half embracing SCRUM. I think that has more to do with the typical command and control nature of upper management though.
- viridian 4y ago
  You should seriously look in to changing companies. I'm not trying to denigrate you in any way, I myself switched from working at $BIG_BANK to a more lithe type of company and 90% of that bullshit went away. Agile + Scrum stuff are minimal and now consume ~4.5% of my week instead of ~12.5%, I'm not spending half my "dev" time babysitting and maintaining giant applications no one really understands in full, and instead work on a bunch of little serverless applications, maybe half of which I do actually understand and can explain end to end.
aj7 4y ago
I learned Fortran 4 in high school in 1967-1968. That’s how good the NYC exam schools were — Stuyvesant in this case. We had our own 1130. This came in handy in college, I did the programming in a physics group, immediately. But it seemed too tedious to do as a career. I still feel that way.
- apurtbapurt 4y ago
  So what you gonna do when you grow up? :-)
  - aj7 4y ago
    F* around in the machine shop.
  - tomcam 4y ago
    Switch to COBOL and REXX
    - worthless-trash 4y ago
      swoon
tannhaeuser 4y ago
I find it astonishing that only a couple years later the basic Unix development environment (ttys and full-screen terminals instead of cards, cc, sh, make, ...) came into existence, and has basically prevailed.
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  UNIX packaged a lot of ideas that had been invented elsewhere. (Often badly.) CTSS -> Multics -> UNIX. All had interactive development and scripting to varying degrees.
rjbwork 4y ago
My dad is an accountant who took some punch card FORTRAN programming classes in the early 70's as well. After 3 semesters he told his professor he wouldn't be returning to the computing department - his professor was shocked, for he was a star pupil! - for much the same reason. He and my mother still tell stories of Saturdays and Sundays spent organizing his punch cards and applying patches (literal in those days!) in the campus computer labs so he could have a more rapid debug cycle than was available during the week.
peter303 4y ago
In one of my early scientist-programmer jobs I was assigned an assistant to keypunch, submit jobs and pick up printouts. The other scientists thought I was odd for wanting to do all this myself. I had much more productivity than them.
maire 4y ago
I agree with your father that batch processing (cards) is a drag. I was in school and working in the computer lab when we switched from batch processing (cards) to a time shared system with terminal labs. I was part of the team that wired up the campus and connected the campus to the ARPANET (precursor to the internet). As we rolled out the terminal labs, each CS class was either assigned to batch processing or time sharing. Since I was part of the lab, I could schedule my classes to be time share only. I was only stuck with 4 classes not in the time share lab. 2 were batch processing. For some reason my LISP and AI classes used a teletype interface. It was not as bad as the cards, but still weird. Some classes allowed me to use my personal computer (TRS80) and work at home. At the time my uncle was a programmer. He said that there was no future in CS and I should switch majors. I could already see the wave coming and ignored the advice.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

smcameron 4y ago

I remember going off to college in 1986, and thinking I might major in computer science, and my dad told me, "anyone can learn to program computers, you might be better off with EE." To be fair, at the time, anyone could learn to program computers (and it's probably still true) -- my dad was doing it, and his major was chemistry -- and really, anyone that's really good at programming computers is necessarily self-taught to a great extent. You just don't become a great programmer by dint of tutoring. Anyway, I stayed in EE for a year, then switched my major to computer science with a minor in EE, and no regrets.

brailsafe 4y ago

It's still tedious grunt work

marcodiego 4y ago

This is something my father told me too. He said he spent some time writing the code on paper, thinking a lot about it; then when he was somewhat sure about what he had written it was time to punch the cards. He used to leave the batch on Friday and went back on Monday to ask the "computer operator" about results and sometimes the result was "syntax error on line 1."

lambdasquirrel 4y ago

> "I didn't thought this thing about computers would go too far." I almost didn't major in Computer Science because in the late 90s, there were so many negative articles in the New York Times, vis-a-vis software. People don't remember it now, but the media and the culture were utterly hostile towards us, and loved to say our jobs were going to India, that everything there was to know about Computer Science could be studied in railyard switching, in existing abstract math textbooks, etc. By a combination of luck, and my dad's insistence, I ended up at Carnegie Mellon, and while I was there, I saw what folks at Google were doing, and I thought to myself, no, this stuff is hard, and this is just going to be the beginning. > "It was way too tedious to do. You'd spend hours getting the cards just right. We used to put them in a shoebox and mark them with a pen in case we dropped them on the way to the lab. Then you'd wait until the next day to get your results. If you had a mistake you'd repeat the whole process" Even what came after that, e.g. in C / C++ was considerably tedious compared to what we do today. Folks sometimes had to do objdumps of compiled binaries to debug what was going on. We had to get coredumps, load them up, and try to determine what memory error had caused things to crash (this is an entire class of problems that doesn't exist today). You used to legit need that CS degree in order to code in your day-to-day because you had to understand the function stack, the network stack, basic syscalls like wait and poll, etc. It was a lot of work, for relatively little product, and I think part of the reason why software is paid more today is in part because of 1. faster processing speeds and 2. better tooling and automation, and higher-level programming languages – all of which were enabled in part by cheaper / faster CPU speeds (e.g. people don't have to care about how slow Python is – you can optimize it after you find product-market-fit), and 3. a better understanding of how software should be developed, at all levels of management.

telcal 4y ago
I majored in Computer Science in the late 90s and honestly don't remember any of what you're saying regarding negative/hostile media. To me it felt like a golden age. The .com bust hadn't happened yet. If you could turn a computer on there were jobs everywhere. The world was starting to get online. Linux was really gaining traction and Slashdot was all time.
smcameron 4y ago
> Even what came after that, e.g. in C / C++ was considerably tedious compared to what we do today. Folks sometimes had to do objdumps of compiled binaries to debug what was going on. They used to do objdumps. They still do, but they used to too.
wilsynet 4y ago
I majored in CS in the late 90s and this wasn’t my experience at all. The Netscape IPO happened in 1995, followed by 5 years of the dot.com gold rush. Computers flew off the shelves, and everyone wanted to get online. The dotcom crash happens later in 2001, but if we are talking about the late 90s, then I’d say it was a period of huge energy in the CS field and tech companies were hiring as fast as they could and jobs were plentiful all around.
nb1987 4y ago
I was in high school in the early 00s and heard the exact same thing, and that was a major reason why I chose not to major in CS! (The other is that my HS programming curriculum and teacher were inadequate, but at the time I was convinced that I just wasn't wired for programming.) In the end I took the long way around and ended up in the field as a self-taught programmer.
_glass 4y ago
When I started uni in 2004 it was still like this. I kind of was ashamed at parties to tell what I study, not to come off as too nerdy. I did a double major, so business was hipper. Just imagine! The status of developers changed so much in two decades. Nowadays people are impressed. And even in my career I see the difference. Not so many VPNs anymore, the move to the cloud made everything much easier.

drittich 4y ago

This is exactly how I first learned to program. Waiting a whole day to find out you had a bug was just way too frustrating for me so I completely wrote it off, as much as I enjoyed writing code. Once the first PCs came on the scene, though, everything changed and I was all over it. Still am.

spaetzleesser 4y ago

I enjoyed programming in the 90s and early 2000s but I feel it’s turning again into tedious grunt work with scrum, agile, yaml configuration files and needlessly complex systems.

switchbak 4y ago
If you really find the agile processes you're using are adding tedium, why don't you do the agile thing and tailor them to your specific context? But I imagine we're probably using the same word to describe very different things.
- spaetzleesser 4y ago
  The current implementation of Agile in most cases is pretty much the opposite of agile as described in the agile manifesto. In my team we have reduced the process to having a simple backlog which we work through. But I have seen other teams where you spend enormous amounts of time on planning but it’s frowned upon if you think any further than the next sprint. Just check off tasks without any thoughts about long term architecture or strategy. Basically just a sweatshop with replaceable “resources” (the company doesn’t hire “people” anymore but “resources”)
  - switchbak 4y ago
    There is no current implementation of Agile though, Agile was an umbrella term for a variety of different practices. I don't think you can blame it if it's been poorly implemented. Granted, that is most of what I see: poorly implemented agile everywhere, usually half embracing SCRUM. I think that has more to do with the typical command and control nature of upper management though.
viridian 4y ago
You should seriously look in to changing companies. I'm not trying to denigrate you in any way, I myself switched from working at $BIG_BANK to a more lithe type of company and 90% of that bullshit went away. Agile + Scrum stuff are minimal and now consume ~4.5% of my week instead of ~12.5%, I'm not spending half my "dev" time babysitting and maintaining giant applications no one really understands in full, and instead work on a bunch of little serverless applications, maybe half of which I do actually understand and can explain end to end.

aj7 4y ago

I learned Fortran 4 in high school in 1967-1968. That’s how good the NYC exam schools were — Stuyvesant in this case. We had our own 1130. This came in handy in college, I did the programming in a physics group, immediately. But it seemed too tedious to do as a career. I still feel that way.

apurtbapurt 4y ago
So what you gonna do when you grow up? :-)
- aj7 4y ago
  F* around in the machine shop.
- tomcam 4y ago
  Switch to COBOL and REXX
  - worthless-trash 4y ago
    swoon

tannhaeuser 4y ago

I find it astonishing that only a couple years later the basic Unix development environment (ttys and full-screen terminals instead of cards, cc, sh, make, ...) came into existence, and has basically prevailed.

TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
UNIX packaged a lot of ideas that had been invented elsewhere. (Often badly.) CTSS -> Multics -> UNIX. All had interactive development and scripting to varying degrees.

rjbwork 4y ago

My dad is an accountant who took some punch card FORTRAN programming classes in the early 70's as well. After 3 semesters he told his professor he wouldn't be returning to the computing department - his professor was shocked, for he was a star pupil! - for much the same reason. He and my mother still tell stories of Saturdays and Sundays spent organizing his punch cards and applying patches (literal in those days!) in the campus computer labs so he could have a more rapid debug cycle than was available during the week.

peter303 4y ago

In one of my early scientist-programmer jobs I was assigned an assistant to keypunch, submit jobs and pick up printouts. The other scientists thought I was odd for wanting to do all this myself. I had much more productivity than them.

maire 4y ago

I agree with your father that batch processing (cards) is a drag. I was in school and working in the computer lab when we switched from batch processing (cards) to a time shared system with terminal labs. I was part of the team that wired up the campus and connected the campus to the ARPANET (precursor to the internet). As we rolled out the terminal labs, each CS class was either assigned to batch processing or time sharing. Since I was part of the lab, I could schedule my classes to be time share only. I was only stuck with 4 classes not in the time share lab. 2 were batch processing. For some reason my LISP and AI classes used a teletype interface. It was not as bad as the cards, but still weird. Some classes allowed me to use my personal computer (TRS80) and work at home. At the time my uncle was a programmer. He said that there was no future in CS and I should switch majors. I could already see the wave coming and ignored the advice.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]