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Admin
I have nothing better to do than post a comment here that adds nothing to anything. I can't even crack a joke about COBOL.
Admin
"COBOL".Substring(0,1) == "C"
There; it's equivalent. And first.
Admin
I had kinda hoped the class was actually a veil that through the coursebook, the students did data entry for MegaCorp.
Admin
What, no HTML comments? I've been robbed... :)
Admin
What, no WTF comments? I've been robbed... :)
Admin
Funny, my operating systems instructor in 2002 started the first day of class by stating "if you don't know assembler (IBM 360) then your going to be in trouble." Up to that point most of the class only used C++ and JAVA maybe perl, ASP, VB6 and started looking at .NET all on unix or windows. We were in trouble. A few weeks later the instructor followed up with, "What have they been teaching you here? " Ummm... stuff that we'll actually use after school.
Admin
I rock back and laugh in my chair as I prepare to modify another COBOL program for one of our clients (you know, the "nobody" that still uses COBOL).
Admin
The college wanted 'C' experience in the late 80s? Really?
I thought they were still pushing Pascal in those days.
Admin
TDWTF's rich text editor for articles likes to eat HTML comments. I've taken to keeping them backed up elsewhere for just such an event. Can you imagine, me writing an article and not having unicorns in it?
Admin
Why the fuck isn't the fucking cornify working? When I saw "Remy Porter" at the top of the page, I got all fucking exciting to be let the fuck down! What a cheap, lying, no-good, rotten, four-flushing, low-life, snake-licking, dirt-eating, inbred, overstuffed, ignorant, blood-sucking, dog-kissing, brainless, fuckless, hopeless, heartless, fat-ass, bug-eyed, stiff-legged, spotty-lipped, worm-headed sack of monkey shit this is!
Holy shit! Where's the Tylenol?!
Admin
Admin
That sounds like the majority of my experience with guidance counselors, too. They don't even attempt to steer you straight. They just want you out of their office.
I had 96 credits for a 64 credit degree, and they told me I needed 3 more: Earth Science. The lowest of the lowest of the sciences. I had taken all the others and gotten A's, but none of them could substitute for it. And it was only available as a tele-course.
I quit and went and got on with my life instead.
Admin
Ah, Christmas time is coming soon, can't wait to break out that movie. It's a tradition...
Admin
After graduating college 5 years ago with an IT degree focusing in web design, I started at a insurance company jumping straight into an entry level position using COBOL, JCL, and Easytrieve+ in a mainframe environment. 6 months later, an opening came up for an open system position, and I gladly jumped over. COBOL is great for processing batch at night, but I feel much better with OOP.
Admin
Actually, the next version of COBOL is
POST INCREMENT COBOL BY 1.
Don't forget the period at the end!
Admin
umadbro?
Admin
No, I think they quit pushing Pascal as soon as I graduated (having had to learn Pascal, of course)
Alex could make good money today. Aren't most of the COBOL programmers dead?
Admin
I can sympathize with the last paragraph.
When I went for an MS in Business, I had to retake the remedial statistics because the professor explained that my previous classes were "Physics statistics" not "Business Statistics". In retrospect, since the class only really covered up through Least Squares Fit and Chi-Squared, I think I learned nothing but did get some credits that didn't count towards the Masters program.
So be it
Admin
Admin
And there was me all happy and everything 'cos I found the Unicorns without looking at the page source!
Admin
My high school switched from Pascal to C++ in 1998, because that was my first programming class. I'm pretty sure they're teaching Java now.
Admin
In 1988, my college-entry choices were c and Ada. The future of defense-industry programming was so bright, we had to wear shades.
Admin
Everyone else is not laughing with you. So you know.
Admin
he he.. same here. I must be another one that doesn't use COBOL (although I was doing a bit of PL/1 today also)
Admin
The Real WTF is people named Alex. (Ooh, wait, is that gonna get me in trouble?)
Admin
Admin
The worse part of this, is that even almost thirty years later, most colleges still seem to think that they are just there to teach languages.
Admin
C'mon, Ted! Don't hold back....tell us what you REALLY think!
Admin
thedailywtf. Where the geek snobs hang out.
Admin
I see what you did there...
COBOL68-RIVERCITY-ACADEMIC-PROCESSOR = CRAP
Admin
The quote does say "Nobody wants to learn COBOL anymore," not "Nobody uses COBOL anymore," so I think it's pretty true.
Admin
I started learning Applesoft BASIC on a school's computer (using "The Applesoft Tutorial" as my textbook.) Then BASIC and a little assembly language on a TRS-80 CoCo (the family computer.) Taught myself LOGO after seeing a TV show about it, then quickly got bored and never used it again.
Then, when I started college, I started teaching myself Turbo Pascal on the college-provided PC during the summer before my Freshman year, and was therefore ahead of the class when that started.
I did wait for the mandatory college courses to learn FORTRAN and VAX-11 assembly language. And I never used them again. Learned LISP as part of an AI class - we never did anything resembling AI, but knowledge of LISP helps when I want to write small extensions to Emacs.
Taught myself object-Pascal, C, C++, and perl because they were interesting. Along the way, I taught myself the Windows and OS/2 APIs, because they were fun. College didn't have courses for any of this.
COBOL? There were courses in college. I chose to not take them. I thought then (and still think today) that knowledge of COBOL is a double-edged sword. If you know it well, you will always be able to find work, but if you know it well, you will never have a job doing anything other than maintaining someone else's COBOL code.
Today? I do all my development in C, C++ and a little perl, all for Linux and embedded-Linux platforms. And I'm quite happy in this role.
Admin
And apparently some students agree. These are the people who went to shop class instead of calculus, now they want VB instead of algorithms.
Admin
I started learning Applesoft BASIC on a school's computer (using "The Applesoft Tutorial" as my textbook.) Then BASIC and a little assembly language on a TRS-80 CoCo (the family computer.) Taught myself LOGO after seeing a TV show about it, then quickly got bored and never used it again.
Then, when I started college, I started teaching myself Turbo Pascal on the college-provided PC during the summer before my Freshman year, and was therefore ahead of the class when that started.
I did wait for the mandatory college courses to learn FORTRAN and VAX-11 assembly language. And I never used them again. Learned LISP as part of an AI class - we never did anything resembling AI, but knowledge of LISP helps when I want to write small extensions to Emacs.
Taught myself object-Pascal, C, C++, and perl because they were interesting. Along the way, I taught myself the Windows and OS/2 APIs, because they were fun. College didn't have courses for any of this.
COBOL? There were courses in college. I chose to not take them. I thought then (and still think today) that knowledge of COBOL is a double-edged sword. If you know it well, you will always be able to find work, but if you know it well, you will never have a job doing anything other than maintaining someone else's COBOL code.
Today? I do all my development in C, C++ and a little perl, all for Linux and embedded-Linux platforms. And I'm quite happy in this role.
Admin
Last month I wrote my first COBOL program: I heard good money can be made as a COBOL programmer.
IDENTIFICATION DIVISION. PROGRAM-ID. FIBO. * * CALCULATION OF FIBONACCI NUMBERS. * * SOFTWARE BY MICHIEL OVERTOOM, JUNE 2011, [email protected] * DATA DIVISION. LOCAL-STORAGE SECTION. 01 REPORTLINE. 05 FILLER PIC X(17) VALUE 'Fibonacci number '. 05 FIBONACCI-ORDER PIC 9(6). 05 FILLER PIC X(4) VALUE ' is '. 05 RESULT PIC 9(6). 01 GLOBAL-WORKING-VARIABLES. 05 BUCKET-1 PIC 9(6). 05 BUCKET-2 PIC 9(6). 05 BUCKET-SUM PIC 9(7). 05 NEEDED-ITERATIONS PIC 9(6). PROCEDURE DIVISION. MAIN SECTION. PERFORM CALCULATE-FIBONACCI-NUMBER VARYING FIBONACCI-ORDER FROM 2 BY 1 UNTIL FIBONACCI-ORDER > 10. STOP RUN. CALCULATE-FIBONACCI-NUMBER SECTION. MOVE 0 TO BUCKET-1. MOVE 1 TO BUCKET-2. COMPUTE NEEDED-ITERATIONS = FIBONACCI-ORDER - 1. PERFORM FIBONACCI-ITERATION NEEDED-ITERATIONS TIMES. MOVE BUCKET-SUM TO RESULT. DISPLAY REPORTLINE. FIBONACCI-ITERATION SECTION. ADD BUCKET-1 TO BUCKET-2 GIVING BUCKET-SUM. MOVE BUCKET-2 TO BUCKET-1. MOVE BUCKET-SUM TO BUCKET-2. END PROGRAM FIBO.Admin
I hear life stories make for great reads.
Admin
I used to own an Atari ST. As a matter of fact, I tossed it about a year ago. However, I never got a chance to use it for COBOL. Instead, I had to use punched cards.
Admin
Admin
I bet they are teaching COBOL in India!
Admin
Exactement, ma cheri!
Admin
Aaaarrggghhh!
It's "graduate FROM high school", not "graduate high school".
The school graduates its students. The students graduate FROM the school.
Admin
Pascal was being pushed in the early 1980s in the UK, but it was recognised as being less than 100% useful outside of education. A recently-graduated schoolfriend was telling me about his first entry-level job writing a Pascal-to-C translator, while I had the delightful task of writing microprocessor test software for the 8085 in hexadecimal on an EPROM programmer (and assembling circuit boards with said 8085s on them with soldering iron and real h-t-g components). Five years previously (1978) we had been learning computer programming by writing simple ALGOL-68 programs on coding sheets which would then be transferred onto punch cards. At the same time the TRS-80 was in the homes of anyone who was anyone, on which you could program in BASIC. Before that (we're talking about 1976, I believe) was the Texas Instruments TI-58 and TI-59, the latter of which had about a kilobyte of RAM and (among other things) an inbuilt program that could invert a 9x9 matrix. In 1975 the first handheld electronic calculator became available for less than 20 bucks (pounds or dollars, who cares) which had 7 digits, 4 functions, a memory and a % key, and lasted 8 hours before you needed to change the battery.
Kids of today, they don't know they're alive.
Admin
Ah, awesome. I don't know how it is now in the land of .edu, but I can't think of a single thing I learned in school or university computer science classes which I hadn't already learned by myself and which I was also able to put to use in the Real World. We were still picking up the printouts from our batch jobs in 1994 for pity's sake...
On second thought, we did learn how to use the fledgling WWW, so can I revise that to "didn't learn anything I could put to productive use"?
Admin
In middle school, I signed up for the computer class. The first day, the teacher came in. His first words were, "TURN OFF THE COMPUTER." He had to tell us 3 or 4 times before they were all turned off and Montezuma's Revenge would have to wait until the next day of class.
The second words were, "Today we will learn how to turn on the computer." Great! To the class's credit, we actually did get to the BASIC programming.
In high school, late 80's early 90's, my high school teacher only knew Pascal. One advanced student learned C using remote learning services.
Thankfully, by the time I got around to college they had dispatched with the Java required class.
Finally, who says Assembly isn't used in the real world? Sure, not every developer is going to use it, but in a systems class at university level, I would expect that to be one of the topics.
Admin
That sounds a bit shitty. At least when I last went to get a degree, they told you up front (a) how many units you needed (480), (b) which of the essential courses was going to be terminated at the end of next year (topology), (c) the maximum number of units I could do in a year (120) and (d) when the degree itself was to be discontinued (4 years time) so at least I was able to put my plan together and squeaked through just in time.
If at the last minute they'd said, "Oh sorry, we forgot to tell you, you need to have done "Elementary Counting for Remedial Students" in order to get your Masters Degree in Fluid Mechanics, Quantum Mechanics, Topology and Abstract Algebra" I would have felt somewhat aggrieved.
Admin
Universities in the 80's were using Pascal, not C. I know UCSD only switched to C for the Intro to Programming class in 1991. And now it's Java. That's a WTF right there.
Admin
Obviously not, as that makes no sense. He probably wasn't given free rein either.
Admin
Admin
Admin
With apologies to Meredith Willson
Mothers of River City! Heed the warning before it's too late! Watch for the tell-tale sign of corruption! The moment your son leaves the house, Does he pull out a pocket protector? Are the letters wearing out on his keyboard? A programming manual hidden in the corn crib? Is he starting to memorize the path to the RIVERCITY-ACADEMIC-PROCESSOR? Are certain words creeping into his conversation? Words like 'buffer?" And 'move i to j?" Well, if so my friends, Ya got trouble, Right here in River city! With a capital "T" And that rhymes with "C" And that stands for Cobol