Re: The tragedy of SQL

On 15/09/21 04:10, Michael Nolan wrote:
> I started programming in 1967, and over the last 50+ years I've 
> programmed in more languages than I would want to list.  I spent a 
> decade writing in FORTRAN on a GA 18/30 (essentially a clone of the 
> IBM 1130) with limited memory space, so you had to write EFFICIENT 
> code, something that is a bit of a lost art these days.  I also spent 
> a decade writing in COBOL.
>
> I've not found many tasks that I couldn't find a way to write in 
> whatever language I had available to write it in. There may be bad (or 
> at least inefficient) languages, but there are lots of bad programmers.
> --
> Mike Nolan
> htfoot@gmail.com

I remember programming in FORTRAN IV on an IBM 1130 at Auckland 
University.  My first attempt to explore Pythagorean triples was written 
in FORTRAN on that machine.  Finally had a useful program written in 
Java about 30 years later.  There are 4 triples starting with 60 that 
satisfy A*2 + B^2 + C^2 where A < B < C and the numbers are mutually 
prime. I was able to handle values of A up to the size of long, so I got 
some pretty big numbers for B & C.  Java's BigInteger class has its uses!

On the IBM 1130 it was faster to use X * X to find the square of a value 
than to use the power notation (of which I've forgotten the syntax).

And for my many sins, I spent years programming in COBOL.

I've written code in over 30 languages.  Probably had most fun writing a 
couple of trivial programs in ARM2/3 assembler -- all instructions 
except one are conditional.

There is no one perfect language, despite what some people might insist!


Cheers,
Gavin