Re: OT Registry cleaners

el cid wrote:
On Jan 31, 1:24 pm, "Kleuskes & Moos" <kleu...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jan 31, 4:57 pm, el cid <elcidbi...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:





On Jan 31, 7:11 am, "Kleuskes & Moos" <kleu...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jan 31, 2:54 am, John Wilkins <j...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <hk2lrk02...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Bob Berger
<Bob_mem...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <a098b8de-d4f8-448f-970f-398d7b3d7...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Kleuskes & Moos says...
On Jan 30, 8:15 pm, Bob Berger <Bob_mem...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article
<f6b41afb-1ad6-4c44-9d4c-d17a00f44...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Kleuskes & Moos says...
On Jan 30, 1:52 am, Bob Berger <Bob_mem...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <hjv8js$71...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Paul J Gans says...
Walter Bushell <pr...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <270120102102136838%j...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
John Wilkins <j...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Wow... Cobol... You _do_ know what Dijkstra had to say on that
language?
You should hear what we students said about it...
COBOL is a read only language.
Great notion! What we need is a perl to COBOL translator.
I'll put that on my "To-Do if I figure a way to make money selling it"
list.
Probably write it in (extended) BASIC.
A Perl to Cobol translator written in Basic....
I hear Dijkstra grumbling in his grave.
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students
that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they
are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
I agree. The problem with BASIC is that you can get something useful
written too
quickly and easily.
And besides, the BASICs of today aren't comparable to the basics of
Dijkstra's day and age. And that's the biggest problem, basic does not
exist, anymore. It's been superseded with 20.000 dialects.
Ain't that true! I've got about a dozen "BASIC" compilers for Windows (I like
QBasic best because it has so many undocumented instructions and parameters),
and about half that many for the UNIX world. (I don't do Mac :-).
Mostly Mac developers use RealBASIC if anything - it has a lot of
classes and libraries out there for various things. Never used it
myself; the only compiler I ever used was a form of Pascal, back before
there were actual computers...
Having been a mac-developer for years*), and having met quite a lot of
them at various conventions, i still have to meet the first one using
RealBASIC (and actually admitting to it...).
Today the "default" development language for the mac seems to be
Objective-C.
*) Back when the PowerPC was excitingly new and most macs used a
Motorola 680x0.
Back wen I did some mac work, I used ThinkC, which provided
a very easy sloped learning curve to develop simple apps.
I think the alternative was the Macintosh Programmers Workshop
which was rather more complicated to get started on.
But more powerfull, i used MPW (with MacApp) until Metroworks
Codewarrior came out. MPW was actually a unix-like shell in disguise,
and it ran the first versions of the C++-compiler (when it was still a
preprocessor for the C-compiler).

Ah... Bittersweet memories....

More powerful indeed but ... the point I was making had to do
with EZ starting. You see, I have some complaints about compilers
and development environments. My perspective is, I'm not a
software engineer and have very little training in software
development but I have needs that are readily solved by rather
simple computational methods. Well, some more simple than
others. A long time ago, the simple tasks were things like
taking a protein sequence, performing an virtual enzymatic
digest and calculating the masses of the peptides you get.
And sometimes taking a list of experimental masses and matching
them up to one or more such lists. On some systems, I could
kick out a very nice little applet to do this in a few
hours and make lots of friends in the process. I thought I
was in the middle of a revolution where lots of scientists
would learn enough simple programming so they would solve
their own problems this way.

But the tools kept getting "more powerful" for people
who programmed full time, as opposed to rarely. The
trend continues. There is an element of market forces
but I think it's more than that. It makes some sense
that software engineers build tools for software
engineers, the group they know about. I'm under the
impression that the "community" of developers considers
part timers to be a problem and not a market.

I've got enough experience with "pros" trying to create
what I ask for to know that communicating ones needs
often fails. And too often it has failed because developers
like to abstract for the sake of abstraction, or to
build toward familiar archtypes, or to try out new
technologies, rather than to do what they know you
asked them to do. You get to cut that part out when
you build for yourself and other like you. It also
fails when I don't communicate effectively but that's
not the most common problem.

Small web app servers with HTML form interfaces
filled the my needs for a time but I find that
everytime I turn around, M$ remodels their IIS
so that I have to go back and make things work again.
They're out to get me I tell you.

The only saving grace in the whole mess is that
it means even my modest developer skills differentiate
me from most other scientists I work with but
I still wish the tools made it easier for more
to get in the game.


A number of years ago I wrote (or tried to write) specialized programs, but I now use spreadsheets. The advantages of not having to deal with checking input and formatting output tend to outweigh the cumbersomeness of having to separate into a series of steps what could be done with a single line of code. And while most of the civil engineering problems I deal with lend themselves to multiple sheet spreadsheets with lookup capabilities, that may not be true for something like a virtual enzymatic digest.

.

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