1967 - 1978 - GE115,GE225, COBOL, assembler, then IBM360 Cobol and RPG2, then Burroughs 3500 COBOL.

those were the days.... and nights.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1112051230.jpg

Took my first FORTRAN class in 1971. Bought the first Apple II computer in the county. Taught some BASIC, Assembler, Pascal to high school kids in the 80's. Many of them have jobs in the industry now. Computer classes went more to applications and less to programming. I haven't programmed in years. Been teaching math, y= mx+b. I may teach a web design class next year. I doubt that I will get to Java, Perl or PHP. It will take a while to build up to that. I likely start with a little HTML, dreamweaver, photoshop to spark their interest. The kids love photoshop - me to.

I may be asking for suggestions on directions to send high school kids. Some have low skills and others are quite advanced. They will need training in jobs that are not going to be primarily done in some other country. Any suggestions on "emerging" jobs in the industry?

KB

Seems like there's a lot in non-programming analyst jobs. Business Process Management and Business Rules are two emerging trends. They involve much more analysis upfront, and a lot of the work traditionally done by programmers is automated through tools. Of course, you need someone who understands what the tool is doing to fix its mistakes...

Sounds like we're headed for another Y2K type episode. Programmers who have been programming for 20+ years understand all of the details and background. Young upstart bosses come in and hope to understand only the upper layers. When the current batch of programmers retire, no one will understand what the "tools" really do.

...and it will all be done in India and/or China by then...

Some of you guys are hella-old-school. Fortan? Dude, you are old.

IMHO:
Objective-C - Best Language and Toolkit Ever
C/C++ - Poo without the Objective-C compiler
Windows MFC - Worst Designing Ever
Perl - Messy, garbled, un-scoped hackery for unix geeks. Hate it.

yeah, and I got the gray hair to prove it. I have a potential future brother in law about my same age who has found a niche updating really old financial software for big firms. Seems no one else can figure it out.

My Cobol, FORTRAN and Pascal gave me a good grounding on programming structure and led well into c, java and web programming... but who uses Perl?!?! get with the times, php or asp or java for server side code, Perl is just nasty. :D

I was doing a little bit of assembler on my Apple II a very long time ago...Now, I recently learned Labview, if that counts as language.
Nothing in between. I meant several times to learn C++, but never really got to it. Labview is perfect for what I am doing (data acquisition combining several gpib instruments).

Aurel

Perl is good for sys admin type stuff, maybe. I guess it is better to go with the tools you know how to use rather than learn a new tool, unless that tool is unique. So I do a lot of my scriptlets in either bash or php...

And yeah, there is money to be made in migrating ancient to new(er)... not quite as much as y2k was worth, but the demand is out there.

Older than dirt - In fact I'm so old I have past the early stages of CRS disease and I'm now well into CRAFT syndrome.

Can't Remember Sh** and Can't Remember A F**king Thing)

Fortran was a luxury to many of us... Compared to Assembler and some others, it was like Heaven...

COBOL was actually a fairly nice language for business apps because of the structure and ability to convert data typs simply by moving things into different copybook structures..

Assembler? You had it easy. All we had were ones and zeros.......and sometimes we didn't even have ones!

Just kidding.
Now: Mostly C/C++ data acquisition/analysis software with the occasional scripting tools for generating control files/etc.
80186 Assembler
8085 Assembler

Before:
Visual Basic
Fortran
C
Sperry Honeywell FVOS (Flexible Versatile Operating System) It was neither flexible nor versatile :(
Assembler Z80/Z85

Anyone else had their name in ascii fly aboard the Space Shuttle?

I've done actual work in ~10 languages and dabbled in quite a few more. I started writing code at 13...assembler, BASIC and Pascal IIRC. I did dBase and Paradox stuff in high school and college to make beer money. These days I deal with C++, VB/VBscript, Java, Perl, PL/SQL, COBOL, and JavaScript on a regular basis but mostly fixing other people's screwups or building stuff that can't easily be delegated.

Its so amazing to me that you guys had the patience to stay with coding in the early days. I have a computer engineering degree and I code professionally in Objective-C (which is about as high-level language as currently exists) and I just wouldn't be able to do that stuff on a day to day basis with the old tools. Flipping bits, advanced memory management, complex computation.... ughh!!!!!

I can drag-n-drop a NSMovieView into my app window, connect my control object to it (drag-n-drop again), give it the path of a Quicktime movie someplace on the system (maybe even run a NSOpenPanel to load the file), and play a movie file in my app in under 2 minutes and 20 lines of code. The NSTextView object comes with built in systemwide spell checker, font control, and "speak text" functionality, in a object that can be drag-n-dropped into your app.

You old-guys are troopers for putting up with what you did. Gold stars and high-fives for all of you.

So, you're a secretary? You just described the OLE API of Microsoft Office :)

No kidding, it's easy to program when someone else makes the components :p

I left off all of the Pascal and VisualBasic I did becuase the Pascal components were plug-together types and VB is scripting, not programming.

It pays the bills :) I'm pretty much a microsoft whore... VB/ASP, but I'm starting to do most new work on .NET (asp.net/vb.net/c#).

Running a small business, I had to drop any pretense i might have of only doing 'higher level' coding. I build/maintain custom apps for small companies and most of them are Microsoft shops.

-Bernie

I am a kindof jealous of the huge market for VBers... To do anything big with Java you have to team up with an established company or fit a specialty niche, it seems.

I started young, but still old as dirt:

Basic
Fortran
HTML
ASP
C++

Now where's my blankie... time for a dirt nap.