Topic: Hey, over here!

[pr0tax]

I wish I had been more responsible to start my own business, something I still think of to this day.

To be honest, with the least life experience ever and being very naive at that age I didn't take advantage of a lot of things, especially the dot com boom, it just seemed to sail by me. I was quite ignorant too, I never thought the internet would boom like it did, I just got myself into a comfortable corner and sat in it... work is still good though as I've built up a huge portfolio of work I've done since 1998!

Glad to see like minded people on here, Indian food is top of my list and I'm looking forward to trying new recipes especially BIR ones and I'm looking forward to contributing back what I can.

[Peripatetic Phil]

And I had the great fortune to start with Algol-68, which I firmly believe is still the finest programming language ever invented.  (I regard "C" as the work of the Devil, despite having been quite keen on BCPL (one of C's ancestors) at one point ...).  Unfortunately Algol-68 seemed to be regarded as "too difficult, too complex, too theoretical" by hoi polloi and fell by the wayside, a fact I will never cease to regret.

** Phil.

[pr0tax]

Digging our heels in deep here Phil  ;D

I did have an office 2007-2009 but the overhead (~?500) a month was ridiculous. I just work from home since 2009 and I'm saving, plus I can claim back on expenses such as rent and what not. It's awesome being able to talk/see the kids whatever time of day and just creep back to my desk whenever I please. I do have a strict routine of 12-14 hours a day Mon-Friday, sometimes weekends included if it's a big job.

Being self-employed is such a roller coaster, one minute you're way up, the next it's rock bottom and the entire journey you never know how much/when/where from pillar to pillar. That's part of the excitement though.

At the top of this year, I found a new platform for online education and I started teaching kids and adults alike how to develop computer games with no programming at all. I've had the privilege of working closely with a global company (I won't namedrop) but they develop awesome software for all ages to develop games and applications in with no programming, I'm quite close to the company itself (although not part of it) and it's a fantastic community with huge potential laying before it.

Do you still do any programming at all?

[Peripatetic Phil]

Digging our heels in deep here Phil  ;D

My former boss didn't call me a dinosaur and a Luddite for nothing

Do you still do any programming at all?

Many many hours a day (far too many, my garden and my cycling suffer).  Currently working on typesetting a catalogue of early Greek MSS (source is in Excel, imported into oXygen and exported as XML, which is then processed by an XML parser/layout engine written in TeX) [1].  Previous project was an interactive electronic edition of a 16th-century Greek  MS [2].

** Phil.
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[1] http://www.rhul.ac.uk/hellenic-institute/research/lpl/greek-mss/ms-1214/demo.pdf
[2] http://www.rhul.ac.uk/hellenic-institute/research/etheridge/

[goncalo]

Blasphemer Phil.... I have not had a chance to play with C's ancestors, but I use C on a regular basis, along with python, which is my favorite prototyping tool. So elegant and simple!  I'm an embedded software engineer (read: hacker) at a telecom company that produces secure network communication equipment used by the 3 letter agencies and U.S military army. Nothing really amusing from a technological standpoint, just your average hardware gadget.

[Peripatetic Phil]

Blasphemer Phil....

I can't be -- George did not moderate my message

I'm an embedded software engineer (read: hacker) at a telecom company that produces secure network communication equipment used by the 3 letter agencies and U.S military army. Nothing really amusing from a technological standpoint, just your average hardware gadget.

You can seriously sit there and write "C" and "secure" in the same sentence ?  No language that allows arbitrary casts, pointer arithmetic and all of the other low-level horrors that C exposes can possibly be used to generate secure systems. 

But, to be slightly more serious, that was one of the great stengths of Algol 68; it simply disallowed all low-level hackery, enforced array-bounds checking, had incredibly strict typing and so on.  But it was also such a joy in which to program -- a language invented /by/ computer scientists, /for/ computer scientists, and one that ticked every possible box for me.  Just as did, some years later, the VAX/VMS operating system; how it lost out and Un*x won I shall never understand.

** Phil.

[goncalo]

C is indeed a language that requires careful handling and thought. I have a background in computer security and a particular interest in safe programming. I am quite a defensive programmer in general, regardless of the language I use. Security is not just about whether your language offers you a few primitives to safe-guard your memory use.  C is mostly used where performance and direct system control is required. Outside that, we use very little C. Of course, C is extensively used as a lot of what we do is hardware drivers. I agree with your point, but according to that logic C is as unsafe as is a santoku knife.

[Peripatetic Phil]

OK, I fear we've hijacked Pr0tax's thread more than enough -- 73's, OM, over and out (here, at least).
** Phil.

[rshome123]

I've done a lot of C programming in my early career, and I have fixed so many memory leaks I can't begin to estimate.  Very efficient but very dangerous in the hands of a slack programmer.  15-20 years ago, processing power was at a premium, as was memory, so languages like C had a very important place. 

My first programming experience was with BASIC on a BBC Micro Model A (8k RAM if I remember correctly, only about half of that was usable.  A later BBC BASIC experience was while at university developing a profit/loss account system on a model B (less than 16k) available. 

Nowadays I don't get out of bed for under 4 Gigabytes.

[pr0tax]

haha, that's fine Phil, I'm enjoying reading this tbh. It was before my time and I do hear the calls of the 'old skool' coders when I attend conventions and such with nostalgic conversation formed into obscure debates within the blink of an eye!

Does anybody happen to remember AMOS and/or STOS?

edit: oh and Goncalo, I can't help but agree with you on that one!