The Nerd Pride Thread....

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Once had a copy of APL: an interactive approach and taught it to myself in high school. Went to the Griffith House at Fernbank in Decatur where they had an APL terminal hooked up to a mainframe that ran APL. Sat down and wrote a program in APL. Worked perfectly after a bit of debugging. Got up to get a drink of water. Sat back down and couldn't read what I'd written. APL is a Write-Only language.
 
Once had a copy of APL: an interactive approach and taught it to myself in high school. Went to the Griffith House at Fernbank in Decatur where they had an APL terminal hooked up to a mainframe that ran APL. Sat down and wrote a program in APL. Worked perfectly after a bit of debugging. Got up to get a drink of water. Sat back down and couldn't read what I'd written. APL is a Write-Only language.
That was pretty much my experience with it in college (New Mexico State University).

My then-girlfriend now-wife worked for a time in the Ag Econ department at NMSU and had the task of maintaining a nearly 200-line-long APL function that was a farming simulator, called BUDGETCAL. That makes my head swim just thinking about it.
 
I have programmed about ten different high level languages. Forth and APL are the only two I found that needed a paradigm-shift in thinking to get "into the groove" with.
And not surprisingly, they're pretty much dead languages now... you can't teach them to the masses. They're just too techy an non-intuitive. All of the most commonly used languages nowadays are a mixture of C and HTML at their core. Thank God there are still applications out there using Cobol on IBM AS400's, or I would be officially retired by now...
 
And not surprisingly, they're pretty much dead languages now... you can't teach them to the masses. They're just too techy an non-intuitive. All of the most commonly used languages nowadays are a mixture of C and HTML at their core. Thank God there are still applications out there using Cobol on IBM AS400's, or I would be officially retired by now...
Remember when forth was supposed to be "The Industry Standard"? Yeah, how's that workin' for you now, eh?
 
It seems like FORTH's continuing applications, few and far between as they are, are not quite as few and far as APL's. Like OverTheTop, these are the only two languages I've tried out that took real effort to get my head around, though I've only approached my many languages as an amateur*. APL was the harder of the two by a bunch. I've never tried LISP.

* With a couple of small exceptions, which were all short term work in BASIC, FORTRAN, C, and 8086 assembler.
 
It seems like FORTH's continuing applications, few and far between as they are, are not quite as few and far as APL's. Like OverTheTop, these are the only two languages I've tried out that took real effort to get my head around, though I've only approached my many languages as an amateur*. APL was the harder of the two by a bunch. I've never tried LISP.

* With a couple of small exceptions, which were all short term work in BASIC, FORTRAN, C, and 8086 assembler.
LISP: Lots of Idiotic, Stupid Parentheses

Just sayin'.

I'ma go learn some FORTH. Just 'cause.
 
In college I had a Ti-58c with the EE module, and I still have my sliderule somewhere in the basement.

I drove a 1973 VW beetle with a plywood floor during said college days.

I can quote almost every episode of TOS and Monty Pythons Flying Circus.

i can still use this:

VQd5AjGh.jpg


H2UZ8wCh.jpg


This is me on the bridge:

5eHf0juh.jpg


These are 2 of my favorite T shirts

ddGi7Hxh.jpg


AoGXPeih.jpg


Do I qualify as a nerd?
 
Once had a copy of APL: an interactive approach and taught it to myself in high school. Went to the Griffith House at Fernbank in Decatur where they had an APL terminal hooked up to a mainframe that ran APL. Sat down and wrote a program in APL. Worked perfectly after a bit of debugging. Got up to get a drink of water. Sat back down and couldn't read what I'd written. APL is a Write-Only language.
I grew up on minicomputers - mostly the DEC PDP-8/e (yes, it had core memory) with a little PDP-11/70 thrown in at the end of college (EE) for good measure. Languages were BASIC, FOCAL, and assembly language. Oh, and on the Computer Science side of my degree I can claim credit for the IBM 370 and it's "interesting" JCL in addition to WATFOR and WATFIV programming languages plus IBM 370 assembly language. IEFBR14, anyone?

In my first job out of college, I did about THIS much (holding thumb and forefinger REALLY closely together) programming in APL. Given the high level language experience I had at the time, I was blown away that APL supported matrix data types and operations. Cool stuff!
 
Incidentally, the B in the pencil grading is Black, and the H in the grading is Hard. My favourite is still the 2B and I have one of those crank handle sharpeners in the workshop that gets used all the time.
And the F ?

LISP: Lots of Idiotic, Stupid Parentheses
Yes it is. I always wondered what they were thinking when they invented this language. I had to learn to use it to write functions for Autocad. Autocad uses their own autolisp, I don't know how close it is to standard lisp.
Otherwise I've programmed in Fortran, Basic, C, Pascal, Autolisp, Visual Basic, Delphi. I'll count that as 7 but it's really more like 5.
 
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I grew up on minicomputers - mostly the DEC PDP-8/e (yes, it had core memory) with a little PDP-11/70 thrown in at the end of college (EE) for good measure. Languages were BASIC, FOCAL, and assembly language. Oh, and on the Computer Science side of my degree I can claim credit for the IBM 370 and it's "interesting" JCL in addition to WATFOR and WATFIV programming languages plus IBM 370 assembly language. IEFBR14, anyone?

In my first job out of college, I did about THIS much (holding thumb and forefinger REALLY closely together) programming in APL. Given the high level language experience I had at the time, I was blown away that APL supported matrix data types and operations. Cool stuff!
I wish to apologize for starting the "languages I've known" theme. That said, in addition to the few I've done real work in, I've also written a little here and there in PASCAL, VBA (but only for UDFs), PL/65; a couple of UNIX shell scripts, some really handy MD-DOS batch files in my days as a PC technician; the assembly languages for 8080/Z80, 6502, IBM360, and 1802; CHIP-8; and my very first was 1802 machine language before I learned what a really neat thing assemblers are.

It's no surprised that my first HLL was BASIC; I'd read a book cover to cover before one of my friends bought a TRS-80 and I had a chance to try it out.
 
We were using PDP-11/70s back in the 1980s for our tram and bus tracking system. Our train system used PDP-11/70s also, but we had to upgrade to PDP-11/84 units to cope with the Y2K problem. Yes, the train system would have come to a halt about a week past the Y2K event.

Nowadays they use the same hardware racks but they have two cards that emulate the PDP systems using IBM Power PC chips. Reliability greatly improved with that change. Still running the same software.
 
Here is a pic of the card punch I mentioned upthread:
View attachment 525606
Oh, wow. Something instinctively makes me want to convulse when I look at that. It's just a gut reaction because I have no idea what it is or does. I thought it was a pasta roller. Maybe it came from a casino? I think the dealers used those in the old West for a card game they called "52 card pickup" similar to "3 card Monte" but different. Maybe it's just allergies.
 
You will note in the F-C attachment ( and I can't believe it got past a proof reader!) they got the artists temperaments backwards. A 'soft' artist uses softer leads and a 'heavy' artist uses harder leads. They both would have to work harder to get acceptable results the way stated. But I only used cuneiform, so what the hell would I know? Do you appreciate how hard it is to render a turbo compressor in cuneiform? Of course not. Punks!
 
Don't forget that Ukraine is successfully counterattacking, just not in Luhansk. They've gained all of the ground around Kyiv, plus advancing roughly to the Russian border outside Kharkiv and moving towards Kherson. They are probably making fairly big moves near Kherson since the Ukrainian army has asked for a news blackout in that region to avoid telegraphing their moves to the Russians.

i can still use this:

VQd5AjGh.jpg
Whilst not a pilot's tool, I do have a couple of spring calculators that look just like that (but in plastic) which I still use occasionally.

TP
 
Oh, wow. Something instinctively makes me want to convulse when I look at that. It's just a gut reaction because I have no idea what it is or does. I thought it was a pasta roller. Maybe it came from a casino? I think the dealers used those in the old West for a card game they called "52 card pickup" similar to "3 card Monte" but different. Maybe it's just allergies.
Insert blank punchcard, dial up character, punch, repeat until line is done.
 
I wish to apologize for starting the "languages I've known" theme. That said, in addition to the few I've done real work in, I've also written a little here and there in PASCAL, VBA (but only for UDFs), PL/65; a couple of UNIX shell scripts, some really handy MD-DOS batch files in my days as a PC technician; the assembly languages for 8080/Z80, 6502, IBM360, and 1802; CHIP-8; and my very first was 1802 machine language before I learned what a really neat thing assemblers are.

It's no surprised that my first HLL was BASIC; I'd read a book cover to cover before one of my friends bought a TRS-80 and I had a chance to try it out.
Our backgrounds seem pretty well aligned, mine with Intel processors - both x86 and embedded products.

One of the most fun/interesting software experiences was "re-learning" how to efficiently architect and write software that ran in an RTOS, which we used at the first company I worked for out of college. This RTOS ("MARS") was internally developed and really lightweight - didn't use a lot of compute overhead or processor resources - and was a huge eye-opener in terms of how to architect software more efficiently for an RTOS than for a traditional embedded environment at that time. Said software was written in PL/M, which was Intel's PL/I'ish language for its family of processors.
 
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I wish to apologize for starting the "languages I've known" theme. That said, in addition to the few I've done real work in, I've also written a little here and there in PASCAL, VBA (but only for UDFs), PL/65; a couple of UNIX shell scripts, some really handy MD-DOS batch files in my days as a PC technician; the assembly languages for 8080/Z80, 6502, IBM360, and 1802; CHIP-8; and my very first was 1802 machine language before I learned what a really neat thing assemblers are.

It's no surprised that my first HLL was BASIC; I'd read a book cover to cover before one of my friends bought a TRS-80 and I had a chance to try it out.
Okay, here's the list of languages I've used:

FORTRAN (bleh!)
BASIC
MUMPS
DCL (Dave Cutler's Language, aka "Digital Command Language")
perl (practical eclectic rubbish lister)
APL
ksh (Korn Shell)
bash (Bourne again shell)
Pascal
C
Python
COBOL (shudder)
SQL
Java
awk
sed
html

Each of these is a language that I've successfully written an application in, not that I'm proficient in all of them. My proficiencies are in MUMPS, Python, Pascal, ksh, perl and sometimes BASIC.
 
I'm not a programmer by trade, but have studied some. I started with BASIC to make some simple games and batch commands in the DOS/Windows 3.1 era. I later learned HTML in text editors. I think it was the bridge between 2-3 then eventually calming down with HTML4 in those days. The differences between how Netscape and IE rendered the page was a pain. Remember browser checks before loading the rest of a site? I also learned visual basic, Javascript, PHP, SQL in the early 2000s. I'll apologize for things I may have experimented with using Flash/Actionscript.

Currently, I'm trying to relearn my lost graphic design and coding skills having focused my career in EMS for so long. I need a backup plan in case of injury or severe burnout. I've been working through learning C# through Unity and Visual Studio.
 
So… isn’t every thread on TRF about nerd pride?

I’ve also coded in over a dozen languages, but has anyone else mounted a giant laser on a drone to kill zombies in their garage after Comic-Con? This is about ten years old and might tilt more geek than nerd, but it is still a classic.

 
First set hand to (keypunch) keyboard in 1969, IBM360/Model 70, JCL, running Fortran IV with Watfor. I can't believe I have been writing code for 53 years!

Every language I've used had its place. I hand assembled 8080 code for the MITS Altair. Loved the 6502 in Apple (even with the flaws in the processor code), the Z80 in the Tandy. The first time I examined a C compiler for a microcomputer, written in assembly code and Tiny C, I thought I had witnessed magic. I loved developing business apps in Pascal (lucky to have avoided COBOL), such a clean procedural language, vastly superior to the BASIC I had been using. Did heavy lifting for a few years in a classic C/Unix shop.

I left coding for a while right when OOP was taking off (I "died"). Then 10 years or so ago I realized that I had lost a part of me and so returned to programming just to occupy my mind. I'm mostly C++ and Python now, but I have a Fortran compiler that I dust off from time to time, running code just like in my college days (but without the punch cards).
 
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Suddenly been called into existence several miles above the surface of an alien planet is not a naturally tenable position for a whale, this innocent creature had very little time to come to terms with its identity. This is what it thought, as it fell:

"Ahhh! Woooh! What's happening? Who am I? Why am I here? What's my purpose in life? What do I mean by who am I? Okay okay, calm down calm down get a grip now. Ooh, this is an interesting sensation. What is it? Its a sort of tingling in my... well I suppose I better start finding names for things. Lets call it a... tail! Yeah! Tail! And hey, what's this roaring sound, whooshing past what I'm suddenly gonna call my head? Wind! Is that a good name? It'll do. Yeah, this is really exciting. I'm dizzy with anticipation! Or is it the wind? There's an awful lot of that now isn't it? And what's this thing coming toward me very fast? So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide sounding name like 'Ow', 'Ownge', 'Round', 'Ground'! That's it! Ground! Ha! I wonder if it'll be friends with me? Hello, Ground!"

Curiously, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias, as it fell, was, "Oh no, not again!" Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly *why* the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now.​
 
Curiously, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias, as it fell, was, "Oh no, not again!" Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly *why* the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now.
For those who inexplicably haven't read the Hitchhiker Trilogy (and if not, you shouldn't be in this thread, yeah I said it), the answer to the above question turns out to be (unsurprisingly) quite hilarious.
 
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