The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Zylon · 2011-09-01 Reply Admin

"The school district was heavily committed to teaching basic programming using COBOL."

I suppose that's better than teaching COBOL programming using Basic.

boog · 2011-09-01 Reply Admin

Matt Westwood:
boog:
David C.:
<life story/>
Who cares?
Sorry, but I for one think this sort of posting interesting.

Well, that answers that. ;)

2011-09-01 Reply Admin

David C.:
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.

LOGO only appeals to intelligent children.

2011-09-01 Reply Admin

Kids today and their interwebs, everything given to them on a platter. We had to make our own platters in those days. I still have my first one sitting here, warped from the heat, with pretty concentric rings from the head crashes. It still brings a lacrimal secretion to my eyes.

2011-09-01 Reply Admin

What got me was "Really? No one's ever gotten that far in the course before...". Like the entire second half of the course was an undocumented feature. And no one ever complained.

method1 · 2011-09-01 Reply Admin

John Evans:
What got me was "Really? No one's ever gotten that far in the course before..."

Its the sort of thing you hear sooner or later if you're a bright kid with no access to expensive private schools.

2011-09-01 Reply Admin

Ghost of Nagesh:
brian j. parker:
Tom Woolf:
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).

The quote does say "Nobody wants to learn COBOL anymore," not "Nobody uses COBOL anymore," so I think it's pretty true.

I bet they are teaching COBOL in India!

As an American who lived and worked in India for a year, I can tell you with certainty that they do. I bought a COBOL textbook for a friend.

Quicksilver · 2011-09-01 Reply Admin

"The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense." - Edsger Dijkstra

Nothing more to say about COBOL

2011-09-01 Reply Admin

I did a year of COBOL at my stupid tech institute. 2 hour compiles on the MV8000 when everyone was compiling at once. Getting 50 page printouts of every error, when really, it was just the first line that was causing all of them.

The next year, they switched to PCs and other languages.

What a waste of a year. Although, I did get laid, go to lots of parties, and drink and smoke a lot. I guess I got my moneys worth.

2011-09-01 Reply Admin

Why doesn't Alex write his own articles?

2011-09-01 Reply Admin

WC:
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.

They steer you straight, alright! straight out of the office!

2011-09-01 Reply Admin

Peter:
Nickster:
The college wanted 'C' experience in the late 80s? Really?
I thought they were still pushing Pascal in those days.

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?

Certainly the ones where I work seem to be...

2011-09-01 Reply Admin

spivonious:
boog:
Peter:
Nickster:
The college wanted 'C' experience in the late 80s? Really?
I thought they were still pushing Pascal in those days.

No, I think they quit pushing Pascal as soon as I graduated (having had to learn Pascal, of course)

At my high school they were pushing Pascal into the late 90s. They switched to C++ my senior year.

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.

We had Ada in 1998 (I think it was a recent thing, because IIRC they were excited about Ada '95). Not much later Java became the flavor of the month - and I'd imagine they'd still be going strong on that...

2011-09-01 Reply Admin

brian j. parker:
Tom Woolf:
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).

The quote does say "Nobody wants to learn COBOL anymore," not "Nobody uses COBOL anymore," so I think it's pretty true.

Does that mean there was a time when people wanted to learn COBOL?

nonpartisan · 2011-09-01 Reply Admin

Cantabrigian:
>Alex wasn't given free reign on the mainframe.
Obviously not, as that makes no sense. He probably wasn't given free rein either.

Sure it does. He didn't get administrative privileges; he wasn't root.

(Not what was intended, is definitely a misspelling, but what Cantabrigian said was true. From a certain point of view . . .)

2011-09-01 Reply Admin

Michiel Overtoom:
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]

...snip...

	END PROGRAM FIBO.

Well, M. Overtoom has provided us with a challenge. Can the collective we not come up with something as svelte as he, to solve the problem in the language of our choice?

rar

2011-09-01 Reply Admin

trtrwtf:
some guy:
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.

And apparently some students agree. These are the people who went to shop class instead of calculus, [b]now they want VB[b/] instead of algorithms.

You can get it loading, you can get it coding, you can get writing a script. A hard earned thirsty needs a big cold beer, and the best cold beer is Vic!

Scarlet Manuka · 2011-09-01 Reply Admin

USofA American:
I bought a COBOL textbook for a friend.

I presume that afterwards they were no longer your friend.

2011-09-02 Reply Admin

Scarlet Manuka:
USofA American:
I bought a COBOL textbook for a friend.
I presume that afterwards they were no longer your friend.

LOL!!!

2011-09-02 Reply Admin

Bah. Standard academic bullshit. I've seen far worse myself...

2011-09-02 Reply Admin

WC:
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.

Eh .. its not actually part of the sciences ;) Geography is, mineralogy surely etc.. but ...

earth science, psychology, women studies .. all that is NOT science -

Beware of imitators, look for the REAL "scienCe" logo !!!

2011-09-02 Reply Admin

RogerWilco:
Nickster:
The college wanted 'C' experience in the late 80s? Really?
I thought they were still pushing Pascal in those days.
Yeah or FORTRAN.

please avoid comparing Pascal and FORTRAN, thanks.

Fortran has (had-maybe they're all ported in C now ?) the best (well of course you cannot quite count mass-threaded gpu-accelerated stuff) math libraries of all the computing languages and has been way more useful than pascal or other retarded languages from the paleolithic.

Same, anyone saying crap about C will be reminded how nothing better has yet been made.

2011-09-02 Reply Admin

David C.:
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.

It's a triple-edged sword !!! Third edge : if you know cobol too well, your brain has already morphed to adapt and is thus largely corrupted.

On a more serious note, seeing your language list makes me want to interest you in Python, surely the best language since the three you cited --

2011-09-02 Reply Admin

George:
trtrwtf:
some guy:
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.

And apparently some students agree. These are the people who went to shop class instead of calculus, [b]now they want VB[b/] instead of algorithms.
You can get it loading, you can get it coding, you can get writing a script. A hard earned thirsty needs a big cold beer, and the best cold beer is Vic!

Only Aussies would get that.

2011-09-02 Reply Admin

I can empathize. I took "computer science" in my senior year of high school (1984-85) in a lab full of Commodore 64s (with two Apple][s for the 'gifted' kids), learning BASIC...

...Wait, did I say "learning"? I meant to say "having an english teacher fumble his way through the textbook, along with the rest of us." It was two semesters of tedious pointlessness, culminating in one of the Asian kids having to correct code that was published in the textbook, to get the final project -- a brief animation -- to work correctly.

Small surprise that I spent the next fifteen years as a "computers are fuckin' bullshit" neo-Luddite.

2011-09-02 Reply Admin

L.:
WC:
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.

Eh .. its not actually part of the sciences ;) Geography is, mineralogy surely etc.. but ...

earth science, psychology, women studies .. all that is NOT science -

Beware of imitators, look for the REAL "scienCe" logo !!!

You missed a few other pretend, mickey-mouse "sciences". You forgot sociology, food technology (including hamburgerology), hospitality studies and integral calculus.

2011-09-02 Reply Admin

Roger Garrett:
Aaaarrggghhh!
It's "graduate FROM high school", not "graduate high school".

The school graduates its students. The students graduate FROM the school.

You must be thinking of English. This stuff is written in American.

2011-09-02 Reply Admin

L.:
RogerWilco:
Nickster:
The college wanted 'C' experience in the late 80s? Really?
I thought they were still pushing Pascal in those days.
Yeah or FORTRAN.

please avoid comparing Pascal and FORTRAN, thanks.

Fortran has (had-maybe they're all ported in C now ?) the best (well of course you cannot quite count mass-threaded gpu-accelerated stuff) math libraries of all the computing languages and has been way more useful than pascal or other retarded languages from the paleolithic.

Same, anyone saying crap about C will be reminded how nothing better has yet been made.

Don't worry about it. There will always be ignoramuses knocking FORTRAN who don't understand her qualities. She may have her limitations, but for an old girl she's remarkably tight.

Severity One · 2011-09-02 Reply Admin

In the latter half of the 80s the US was into terrible music [...]

I beg your pardon? Whilst the apex of the music industry, from a artistic point of view, clearly lies in the early eighties, it's nothing short of an affront to label eighties music 'terrible'.

Well, except for Michael Bolton of course.

2011-09-02 Reply Admin

DMJ:
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

You had to learn which subset of physics statistics you could use without confusing your business professor.

Kiss me I'm Polish · 2011-09-02 Reply Admin

I remember being taught Turbo Pascal at the high school in the mid-nineties. It was getting really old at that moment. There was a known bug in the CRT library, which was causing all programs to hang on a Windows 95 machine. Solution? Include a fixcrt hack at the beginning of every program. There was no vendor patch available, and I think TP6.0 wasn't supported any more by Borland. On the other hand Turbo Pascal had Turbo Vision, an ingenous event-driven object environment... oh wait, we never got to that part in class.

Arancaytar · 2011-09-02 Reply Admin

It's not all about the credits; learning COBOL has character-building value. (Mind you, it will also shave years of your life and endanger your mental health.)

2011-09-02 Reply Admin

USofA American:
Ghost of Nagesh:
brian j. parker:
Tom Woolf:
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).

The quote does say "Nobody wants to learn COBOL anymore," not "Nobody uses COBOL anymore," so I think it's pretty true.

I bet they are teaching COBOL in India!

As an American who lived and worked in India for a year, I can tell you with certainty that they do. I bought a COBOL textbook for a friend.

Looks like you got conned. Being a patriotic USofA American that you are, may I offer you a chance to get 100 million US$ from a certain Col. in libya's account. I assure you that this colonel is quite wealthy but may be dead soon. So can I have you account number, password and the whole works?

2011-09-02 Reply Admin

Arancaytar:
It's not all about the credits; learning COBOL has character-building value. (Mind you, it will also shave years of your life and endanger your mental health.)

It can also be a money-maker. There are companies out there that are still running COBOL applications who need an upgrade. Unfortunately it often requires somebody who is acquainted with COBOL who can provide the essential point of contact to interpret what the existing code actually does.

In particular it's the data structures which most need to be reverse engineered. I've seen "modern" systems whereby the COBOL data structure has simply been lifted and ported directly as-is into an Oracle database structure, which has to be a whole bucket of fail on its own.

In fact, I feel a WTF submission coming on ...

token_woman · 2011-09-02 Reply Admin

ted:
four-flushing

i lol'd

2011-09-02 Reply Admin

Don't discount Pascal! Comparison of object pascal, java, c++ salary trends: http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=object+pascal&l1=&q2=lisp&l2=&q3=c%2B%2B&l3=&q4=java&l4=&q5=javascript&l5=&q6=actionscript&l6=&tm=1

2011-09-02 Reply Admin

thursdaysgeek:
Actually, the next version of COBOL is
POST INCREMENT COBOL BY 1.

Don't forget the period at the end!

Nobody uses that tired old pile of crap. The world moved on to ADD 1 TO COBOL GIVING COBOL. years ago.

cyphax · 2011-09-02 Reply Admin

Remy Porter:
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?

Honestly, I guess I can only hope to. The unicorns are more stale than a bag of chips left open for a week. It's only cute/fun for a while.

The story's good tho, if not depressing. :P

2011-09-02 Reply Admin

boog (real):
Who cares?

You forgot to log out.

frits · 2011-09-02 Reply Admin

The Article:
The desktop computers were connected to a microwave antenna on the roof of the school. That antenna was oriented towards the district's main office a few miles away where another antenna rested. That antenna was wired to a Tandem mainframe running COBOL-68.

Were these computers wired directly to the antennas? That may be your problem right there...

frits · 2011-09-02 Reply Admin

tharpa:
thedailywtf. Where the geek snobs hang out.

Are there any other kinds of geek?

frits · 2011-09-02 Reply Admin

MeanDean:
I can empathize. I took "computer science" in my senior year of high school (1984-85) in a lab full of Commodore 64s (with two Apple][s for the 'gifted' kids), learning BASIC...
...Wait, did I say "learning"? I meant to say "having an english teacher fumble his way through the textbook, along with the rest of us." It was two semesters of tedious pointlessness, culminating in one of the Asian kids having to correct code that was published in the textbook, to get the final project -- a brief animation -- to work correctly.

Small surprise that I spent the next fifteen years as a "computers are fuckin' bullshit" neo-Luddite.

It makes perfect sense they would choose a Language Arts teacher to teach a language...

PedanticCurmudgeon · 2011-09-02 Reply Admin

Cantabrigian:
>Alex wasn't given free reign on the mainframe.
Obviously not, as that makes no sense. He probably wasn't given free rein either.

Spelling has been out of fashion for at least a decade. Maybe it will come back in another 10 years or so, like the Argyle sweater did.

2011-09-02 Reply Admin

L.:
earth science, psychology, women studies .. all that is NOT science

I believe this is traditionally the bit at which I am required to foam at the mouth and tear you limb from limb?

Psychology is a science.

Psychology may be a science that is frequently taught badly, and even more frequently abused by frauds who want to add a veneer of 'scienceyness' to their crystal ball gazing, but that doesn't stop it being a science, any more than the existence of astrology means that astronomy isn't a science.

(I speak as one who had to do a bunch of practicals and design, carry out, analyse and write up some original research in order to pass my course. I regularly feel an overwhelming desire to feed upon the livers of those who bring my subject into disrepute.)

Coyne · 2011-09-02 Reply Admin

The link is down? Probably something to do with the lunar phase.

Coyne · 2011-09-02 Reply Admin

Jonesy:
WC:
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.
They steer you straight, alright! straight out of the office!

...and straight into the wall. Boom!

2011-09-02 Reply Admin

tharpa:
hobbes:
Mike:
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.
I think I see the problem.. you have an IT degree focusing on web design.
Everyone else is not laughing with you. So you know.

thedailywtf. Where the geek snobs hang out.

So making things look pretty is what IT is all about?

Ilya Ehrenburg · 2011-09-02 Reply Admin

frits:
tharpa:
thedailywtf. Where the geek snobs hang out.
Are there any other kinds of geek?

There are other kinds of snob.

2011-09-02 Reply Admin

ceiswyn:
L.:
earth science, psychology, women studies .. all that is NOT science

I believe this is traditionally the bit at which I am required to foam at the mouth and tear you limb from limb?

Psychology is a science.

Psychology may be a science that is frequently taught badly, and even more frequently abused by frauds who want to add a veneer of 'scienceyness' to their crystal ball gazing, but that doesn't stop it being a science, any more than the existence of astrology means that astronomy isn't a science.

(I speak as one who had to do a bunch of practicals and design, carry out, analyse and write up some original research in order to pass my course. I regularly feel an overwhelming desire to feed upon the livers of those who bring my subject into disrepute.)

But astronomy isn't a science. It's just a bunch of people staring at the sky. Even I could do that if I just lay on my back all day. How can that be a science?

Media studies, now that's a science, and a worthy one too. How would creative people know what to create for the enjoyment of their clients if they didn't know what their clients wanted to buy?

2011-09-02 Reply Admin

The Poop... of DOOM!:
tharpa:
hobbes:
Mike:
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.
I think I see the problem.. you have an IT degree focusing on web design.
Everyone else is not laughing with you. So you know.

thedailywtf. Where the geek snobs hang out.
So making things look pretty is what IT is all about?

No, but it's where the money lies. Muggles will part with a lot of readies in order to obtain something sparkly and shiny, be damned to what it contains.

Common Educational Oriented Language

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