rbowman wrote this post; take it under advisement:

> On Sat, 5 Oct 2024 11:55:56 +0200, D wrote:
>
>> For the customer it is great, and brings a lot of technical credibility
>> to the deal. For the technologist it is also great, because they get
>> first hand experience with the problems of the customer and I have seen
>> that it changes how they think about what they do.
>
> I've worked closely with a couple of clients but in general it's not a
> good idea to let programmers talk to the clients. Programmers don't have
> very good filters.

Heh, I once noted in a meeting with a Master Chief that our project had a
fair amount of "spaghetti code".

Hoo boy. Took years to recover from that one.

--
Lay on, MacDuff, and curs'd be him who first cries, "Hold, enough!".
-- Shakespeare

In article <lmee11FkvjiU3@mid.individual.net>,
rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:
>On Sat, 5 Oct 2024 22:52:21 +0200, R Daneel Olivaw wrote:
>
>> Given that Ralph Nader's candidacy in 2000 had a lot to do with Dubya
>> being elected, I can understand it. When did a third-party candidate
>> last win? The last one who got anywhere at all was Ross Perot and the
>> major effect of his candidacy was to let Bill Clinton through to defeat
>> Dubya's Daddy.
>
>Montana has went blue twice in the last 70 years or so. Once was the
>Goldwater fiasco and the other was Perot. It certainly wasn't love for
>Clinton although truth be told GHWB wasn't a real winner either.
>Personally, I couldn't stomach the man.

Bushes like Prescott, Gerge sr and George Jr are not real republicans
like the Cheneys!
--
Member - Liberal International This is doctor@nk.ca Ici doctor@nk.ca
Yahweh, King & country!Never Satan President Republic!Beware AntiChrist rising!
Look at Psalms 14 and 53 on Atheism ;

On Sun, 06 Oct 2024 06:05:39 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

> On the other hand, if the salesman is a dork you can accomplish a lot
> more by letting a programmer jump in. (I've been said programmer.)

So have I.

> Best of all is if one of the client's techies is present - then the two
> of you can bypass your filters and really get things worked out.

Bliss!

Though that’s only relevant if the company is big enough. In my last few
jobs, I was the (self-employed) techie and I was talking directly to the
client company’s IT Manager (who did everything IT-related), or even to
the company’s boss (because he was the one who did everything IT-related).

On Sat, 5 Oct 2024 23:59:49 -0400, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:

> On 10/5/24 4:07 AM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>
>> Putting strict limits on campaign spending would be a good start.
>
> They WILL put work-arounds, loopholes and cheats into any such laws.

Only if you think the rule of law is a futile exercise. If you are getting
that impression in your country, because your judiciary is not independent
of your politicians, then your society is already in a state of collapse.

On 2024-10-06, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

> On Sun, 06 Oct 2024 06:05:38 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>
>> IBM 360 machine code was relatively
>> straightforward, so it wasn't quite as hard to do as on many
>> microprocessors.
>
> There was the handy little reference card that would fit nicely into a
> pocket protector :)

Yup. We sometimes called a "fig leaf". I got mine almost completely
memorized at about the time it fell apart.

https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/mainframe-computers/7/164/659

> I may be thinking of another processor but as I
> recall you could twiddle octal locations in the opcodes.

Perhaps - the 360 did things completely in hex.

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | We'll go down in history as the
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | first society that wouldn't save
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | itself because it wasn't cost-
/ \ if you read it the right way. | effective. -- Kurt Vonnegut

On Sun, 6 Oct 2024 11:38:07 +0200, D wrote:

> On Sun, 6 Oct 2024, rbowman wrote:
>
>> I've worked closely with a couple of clients but in general it's not a
>> good idea to let programmers talk to the clients. Programmers don't
>> have very good filters.
>>
>>
> I never had any problems, but on the other hand, perhaps I either was
> lucky to never work with any madmen, or I'm a good judge of character.
>
> All programmers I've worked with, except one, were generally very nice
> people, and the ones who had no interest in being involved in the
> commercial side, I would obviously not drag in front of the customer.

Nice has little to do with it. If the salesman is blowing a little smoke a
programmer might inadvertently let the cat out of the bag. It's even worse
if there is also a programmer from the client's company in the meeting and
they start sharing notes.

On Sun, 6 Oct 2024, rbowman wrote:

> On Sun, 6 Oct 2024 11:38:07 +0200, D wrote:
>
>> On Sun, 6 Oct 2024, rbowman wrote:
>>
>>> I've worked closely with a couple of clients but in general it's not a
>>> good idea to let programmers talk to the clients. Programmers don't
>>> have very good filters.
>>>
>>>
>> I never had any problems, but on the other hand, perhaps I either was
>> lucky to never work with any madmen, or I'm a good judge of character.
>>
>> All programmers I've worked with, except one, were generally very nice
>> people, and the ones who had no interest in being involved in the
>> commercial side, I would obviously not drag in front of the customer.
>
> Nice has little to do with it. If the salesman is blowing a little smoke a
> programmer might inadvertently let the cat out of the bag. It's even worse
> if there is also a programmer from the client's company in the meeting and
> they start sharing notes.
>

That's a bad salesman then. I'm saying that based on _my_ experience, it
has always worked out great. I do not think you are able to disprove what
I have experienced and what has worked for me throughout an entire career.
So there you go.

You're the salesman, so you manage the account, and that means that you
are also responsible, ultimately for the people you bring with you. It's
as simple as that.

On 10/5/2024 9:20 PM, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
> On 10/5/24 2:12 AM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>> On 4 Oct 2024 22:47:30 GMT, rbowman wrote:
>>
>>> ... many people using a high level abstraction like Python think
>>> of it as some sort of magic ...
>>
>> What we have seen in this thread (and others) is many of the younger ones
>> think C is that “magic” out of which all else is woven.
>
>   MOSTLY true ...
>
>   Well, in the end, it's the CPU microcoding ... all else
>   is just a way to make use of that  :-)
>
>   Almost everything in Python ... well, it's a 'C' app
>   really, just made to LOOK like another computer language.
>
>   Quite a number are even more like that, the GNU compilers
>   especially. They're just syntax translators, turn your
>   'FORTRAN' or 'COBOL' or FORTH or whatever into kinda
>   unreadable 'C' to then be compiled.

As far as I know, it's a mixed bag.

The GNU Fortran compiler translates Fortran to an intermediate language,
just as it does with C and C++, and the intermediate language is
translated to machine code.

According to this page:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/gnucobol/

GNU COBOL translates COBOL to C, which is then compiled by gcc.

GNU Forth... I don't know enough about it to have an opinion.

Python, to the best of my knowledge, is compiled to bytecode which is
then executed by a virtual machine. You COULD write a C program that
would do what a Python program does, but depending on what features the
program used, it might not be worth it; by the time you implemented
Python data structures and other stuff, you'd have something as big and
complicated as Python itself, and you might as well write the program in
Python to begin with. You'd get the program done a lot faster, and it
would be much easier to maintain.

Louis

186282@ud0s4.net <186283@ud0s4.net> wrote:
> On 9/24/24 3:04 PM, Lester Thorpe wrote:
>> On Tue, 24 Sep 2024 02:45:16 -0400, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Me, I'd rather use 'C' ... which was a brand new
>>> language when I got into computers - it was the
>>> Cool New Thing on PDP-11s. However the syntax IS,
>>> and especially can be MADE, a bit obscure. More
>>> 'obvious', 'self-documenting' langs DO have an
>>> advantage.
>>>
>>
>> C is just shorthand for assembly, and assembly,
>> i.e. machine, language is the language to which
>> EVERYTHING else reduces.
>>
>> Yes, C is just shorthand for assembly. Whenever I
>> write C code I can always "see" the assembly instructions
>> that lie beneath every C statement.
>>
>> In fact, when it comes to SIMD programming, there are C
>> functions known as "intrinsics" that allow direct access
>> to SIMD hardware assembly instruction (e.g. SSE2, AVX).
>> (These do not exist for any other language.)
>>
>>
>> Conclusion:
>>
>> Those who understand the machine use C (assembly) and only
>> C.
>>
>> All dumb-fuck idiots and retards, of which there are hordes
>> in commercial (i.e. paid) programming, MUST use other "crutch"
>> languages.
>
>
> We 'old guys' did a fair amount of ASM back in
> the day - microcontrollers, even up to early CP/M
> and DOS before there were (affordable) high-level
> compilers.
>
> Knew one ultra-geek who wrote clones of popular
> video games for C64/PET. He was one of those
> 'critically intelligent' people - right on the
> very edge. Ever see that old Val Kilmer movie
> about the genius school ? He was kinda like the
> guy who lived inside the walls. He didn't even
> do ASM, but wrote in raw 6502 binary. Said it
> gave him a buzz ! Watched him do it.
>
> It's very frustrating - being JUST smart enough to
> really smell the ultra-IQ, see its possibilities,
> but knowing you can never GET there :-)
>
> I downloaded a copy of the ancient Aztec 'C'
> compiler for CP/M-86. Haven't done anything
> with it yet. CP/M-86 WILL run on VirtualBox.
> Aztec was well-respected back in the day.
> The most interesting feature though is the
> MANUAL ... very deep into optimization and
> smarter bit-field representations and ops.
> You do NOT see that anymore. Those people
> REALLY knew their product and wanted you to
> know ALL the task-specific options.
>
>

I used Aztec C on PC-DOS back in the day. It was the first C compiler I
ever used.

--
Pete

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
> On Sat, 5 Oct 2024 12:40:26 +0100, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>
>> On 05/10/2024 03:37, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>>
>>> On 2024-10-04, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Is Canada more party-based, like the UK and NZ?
>>>
>>> Yes - and unfortunately we're starting to accumulate our share of
>>> right-wing whacko candidates, both federally and provincially.
>>>
>> Well you have had a generation of left wing whackos. Only fair.,
>
> When somebody who expresses support for abortion rights gets tarred with
> the “radical left” brush, you have to wonder who the right-wingers would
> consider “moderate left”.
>
> Seems like the concept of being “moderate”, or having a diversity of
> views, doesn’t exist for them: if you are not 100% for them, then you must
> be against them.
>

It would be really hilarious watching them tie themselves in knots trying
to (not) answer the question “who won the 2020 election”, if it weren’t so
sad. This question has a one or two word answer, however you want, and
saying anything else is a joke. Apparently the Great Orange won’t tolerate
a real answer.

--
Pete

rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 5 Oct 2024 11:55:56 +0200, D wrote:
>
>> For the customer it is great, and brings a lot of technical credibility
>> to the deal. For the technologist it is also great, because they get
>> first hand experience with the problems of the customer and I have seen
>> that it changes how they think about what they do.
>
> I've worked closely with a couple of clients but in general it's not a
> good idea to let programmers talk to the clients. Programmers don't have
> very good filters.
>

Give them an idea and programmers are likely to go off into the wild blue
yonder. “I wonder what would happen if we used AI for this problem?” or
whatever the programmer’s favorite technology of the month is.

--
Pete

On 6 Oct 2024 06:26:32 GMT, rbowman wrote:

> ... as I recall you could twiddle octal locations in the opcodes.

Sounds PDP-11-ish. The instruction layout was such that, if an instruction
was expressed as an integer, register numbers and addressing modes fitted
neatly into particular octal digits.

Not sure if that was true of the PDP-10. The later VAX went all hex, of
course.

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:

> On 6 Oct 2024 06:26:32 GMT, rbowman wrote:

>> ... as I recall you could twiddle octal locations in the opcodes.

> Sounds PDP-11-ish. The instruction layout was such that, if an instruction
> was expressed as an integer, register numbers and addressing modes fitted
> neatly into particular octal digits.

> Not sure if that was true of the PDP-10. The later VAX went all hex, of
> course.

The PDP-10 instruction layout is

1 1 1 1 1 2 3 3
0......8 9..2 3 4..7 890123456789012345
op code AC I IX address offset

All represented in octal. The HALT instruction (a variant on the JRST) is a
good example:

HALT RESUME(17) ;RESUME is a symbolic address, let's say 654321

The assembly representation is

254 04 0 17 654321

The in-memory representation is 254217654321. Patching from the front panel of
a 166, KA-10, or KI-10 processor is simple enough, if you know where your program
lives in memory (not a given, since the entire line is intended for multiuser
usage).

--
Rich Alderson news@alderson.users.panix.com
Audendum est, et veritas investiganda; quam etiamsi non assequamur,
omnino tamen proprius, quam nunc sumus, ad eam perveniemus.
--Galen

On Sun, 6 Oct 2024 15:58:16 -0700, Peter Flass wrote:

> Apparently the Great Orange won’t tolerate a real answer.

Once you have people putting the ascendancy of their political party over
the good of the country, your democracy is in trouble.

On Sun, 6 Oct 2024 15:58:17 -0700, Peter Flass wrote:

> Give them an idea and programmers are likely to go off into the wild
> blue yonder. “I wonder what would happen if we used AI for this
> problem?” or whatever the programmer’s favorite technology of the month
> is.

My “wild blue yonder” was putting in an LDAP server for a client earlier
this year.

He’s used to editing /etc/passwd and friends, would you believe. So I
wanted to keep the data in those files, but make it available via LDAP
for authentication use on another server. I couldn’t find any existing
way to do that easily, so I created my own
<https://bitbucket.org/ldo17/serve_passwd/>.

On Sun, 6 Oct 2024 16:06:14 -0600, Louis Krupp wrote:

> GNU Forth... I don't know enough about it to have an opinion.

https://gforth.org/manual/Forth-is-written-in-Forth.html

Forth is an odd beast. There is a very small engine that has to be built
for the processor in question to handle words.

https://github.com/forthy42/gforth/tree/master/engine

gcc can handle that since it is C code.

On Sun, 6 Oct 2024 15:58:17 -0700, Peter Flass wrote:

> rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:
>> On Sat, 5 Oct 2024 11:55:56 +0200, D wrote:
>>
>>> For the customer it is great, and brings a lot of technical
>>> credibility to the deal. For the technologist it is also great,
>>> because they get first hand experience with the problems of the
>>> customer and I have seen that it changes how they think about what
>>> they do.
>>
>> I've worked closely with a couple of clients but in general it's not a
>> good idea to let programmers talk to the clients. Programmers don't
>> have very good filters.
>>
>>
> Give them an idea and programmers are likely to go off into the wild
> blue yonder. “I wonder what would happen if we used AI for this
> problem?” or whatever the programmer’s favorite technology of the month
> is.

Well, yeah, what fun is doing the same old thing? I tasked a new
programmer with a stand alone interface to see how he would perform. I
didn't really expect to have a Go project in our source tree but so it
goes. It joined the C, C++, C#, Fortran, Python, Java, and Javascript
code. I'm not sure if it was ever deleted but there might even be some
Tcl/Tk.

On 7 Oct 2024 03:13:47 GMT, rbowman wrote:

> I'm not sure if it was ever deleted but there might even be some
> Tcl/Tk.

I used that for just one project. Previously I had only done stuff that
ran on Linux servers and were accessed through a web interface. This time
it needed to run on the local GUI.

Soon after that, I discovered Python. For the next iteration of the Tcl/Tk
project, I scrapped the old code and rewrote it in Python, using GTK as
the toolkit.

After that, I never used Tcl again.

On 06/10/2024 23:06, Louis Krupp wrote:
> GNU Forth... I don't know enough about it to have an opinion.

FORTH is an interpreted language

--
"It was a lot more fun being 20 in the 70's that it is being 70 in the 20's"
Joew Walsh

Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> writes:

>On 2024-10-06, 186282@ud0s4.net <186283@ud0s4.net> wrote:

>> We 'old guys' did a fair amount of ASM back in
>> the day - microcontrollers, even up to early CP/M
>> and DOS before there were (affordable) high-level
>> compilers.

>Those of us in the mainframe world wrote a lot of
>assembly language too, e.g. for the IBM 360 family.
>Back when memory was really tight, you might not
>even be able to run a compiler (although RPG would
>run in 16K or less). And even if you had a compiler,
>the resulting code might not fit into memory for
>anything other than trivial applications.

When at NASA-LeRC, I needed a simple PDP-11 utility to test a
serial card mod I'd made. I walked around seeking a software
wizard to create same.

I found Wally; tall, western shirts, cowboy boots, in the
hallway. "What's the address of this here critter?" and I told
him.

He took my pad of yellow quad paper, and wrote out ~25 lines of
octal. "Punch this in from the front panel.." and I did.

--
A host is a host from coast to coast...............wb8foz@panix.com
& no one will talk to a host that's close..........................
Unless the host (that isn't close).........................pob 1433
is busy, hung or dead....................................20915-1433

On 4 Oct 2024 22:35:48 GMT
rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

> > Just ask the Irish... :/
>
> But they managed to be a net exporter of food while starving. Just
> ask the Brit beef eaters.

True that...

David Lesher wrote this post; take it under advisement:

> Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> writes:
>
>>On 2024-10-06, 186282@ud0s4.net <186283@ud0s4.net> wrote:
>
>>> We 'old guys' did a fair amount of ASM back in
>>> the day - microcontrollers, even up to early CP/M
>>> and DOS before there were (affordable) high-level
>>> compilers.
>
>>Those of us in the mainframe world wrote a lot of
>>assembly language too, e.g. for the IBM 360 family.
>>Back when memory was really tight, you might not
>>even be able to run a compiler (although RPG would
>>run in 16K or less). And even if you had a compiler,
>>the resulting code might not fit into memory for
>>anything other than trivial applications.
>
> When at NASA-LeRC, I needed a simple PDP-11 utility to test a
> serial card mod I'd made. I walked around seeking a software
> wizard to create same.
>
> I found Wally; tall, western shirts, cowboy boots, in the
> hallway. "What's the address of this here critter?" and I told
> him.
>
> He took my pad of yellow quad paper, and wrote out ~25 lines of
> octal. "Punch this in from the front panel.." and I did.

Yeeeeeeeeee haaaaawwwwwww!

Heh heh, a rented car will right through any amount of non-existent road up
and down mountains and canyons.

--
Some people say a front-engine car handles best. Some people say a
rear-engine car handles best. I say a rented car handles best.
-- P. J. O'Rourke

On Mon, 7 Oct 2024 06:40:00 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

> On 7 Oct 2024 03:13:47 GMT, rbowman wrote:
>
>> I'm not sure if it was ever deleted but there might even be some
>> Tcl/Tk.
>
> I used that for just one project. Previously I had only done stuff that
> ran on Linux servers and were accessed through a web interface. This
> time it needed to run on the local GUI.

iirc it was an interface to SCCS someone had cobbled together. Most of the
code base had migrated to RCS but one site had branched off into its own
little world, wasn't actively being developed, and was still SCCS.

> Soon after that, I discovered Python. For the next iteration of the
> Tcl/Tk project, I scrapped the old code and rewrote it in Python, using
> GTK as the toolkit.
>
> After that, I never used Tcl again.

I did one test app to simulate a paging interface using Tkinter. That was
enough. Today I would go with Pyside6.

In article <lmioedFao29U1@mid.individual.net>,
rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:
>On Mon, 7 Oct 2024 06:40:00 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>
>> On 7 Oct 2024 03:13:47 GMT, rbowman wrote:
>>
>>> I'm not sure if it was ever deleted but there might even be some
>>> Tcl/Tk.
>>
>> I used that for just one project. Previously I had only done stuff that
>> ran on Linux servers and were accessed through a web interface. This
>> time it needed to run on the local GUI.
>
>iirc it was an interface to SCCS someone had cobbled together. Most of the
>code base had migrated to RCS but one site had branched off into its own
>little world, wasn't actively being developed, and was still SCCS.
>
>> Soon after that, I discovered Python. For the next iteration of the
>> Tcl/Tk project, I scrapped the old code and rewrote it in Python, using
>> GTK as the toolkit.
>>
>> After that, I never used Tcl again.
>
>I did one test app to simulate a paging interface using Tkinter. That was
>enough. Today I would go with Pyside6.
>
>

Tcl/Tk 9.0 was just released, and comp.lang.tcl is as active as this group.
--
columbiaclosings.com
What's not in Columbia anymore..

rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote or quoted:
>I did one test app to simulate a paging interface using Tkinter. That was
>enough. Today I would go with Pyside6.

I recently whipped up this bare-bones program that kicks out
a fresh page with a random number every time you hit the
spacebar. Runs on Windows with tkinter, and on Linux with
curses. (My AI sidekick helped me iron out some kinks!)

import random
import sys
import os

# Determine the operating system
is_windows = os.name == 'nt'

if is_windows:
import tkinter as tk
else:
import curses

class RandomNumberGenerator:
def __init__(self):
self.random_range = (1, 1000)

def generate_number(self):
return random.randint(*self.random_range)

class LinuxApp(RandomNumberGenerator):
def run(self):
def main(stdscr):
while True:
key = stdscr.getch()
if key == ord(' '):
stdscr.clear()
stdscr.addstr(str(self.generate_number()))
stdscr.refresh()
elif key == ord('q'):
break

curses.wrapper(main)

class WindowsApp(RandomNumberGenerator):
def run(self):
root = tk.Tk()
root.title("Random Number Generator")

text_widget = tk.Text(root, height=5, width=30)
text_widget.pack(padx=10, pady=10)
text_widget.insert(tk.END, "Press SPACE to generate a random number")

def generate_number_gui(event):
text_widget.delete(1.0, tk.END)
text_widget.insert(tk.END, str(self.generate_number()))

root.bind('<space>', generate_number_gui)
root.mainloop()

def main():
app = WindowsApp() if is_windows else LinuxApp()
app.run()

if __name__ == "__main__":
main()