Commentary
Since…
Well what do you think of the totally revamped issue of MWM? Some of you will notice that your comments have not fallen in the abyss. I read each and every e-mail, noting down the points you put forward. A few of suggestions made me understand that being color happy gave the impression of an amateurish publication. I hope you like the new look. One interesting feature we hope to implement soon is the facility to have an article read to you. We are experimenting with the technology in a MFreeZone feature idealized by my wife. Let us know what you think.
Who's On hosts Arthur B. Smith. Art is the new chairman at MDC. Art was the first person to respond to my newsgroup posting asking for help with my Geocities page about the programming language called M or MUMPS. If you go through the page, you'll notice that his name appears in the main index of my web page.
One particular important change has been to the tutorial we are currently running; the name has been changed from Teach You, Teach Me to M Tutorial. Everything else remains the same. While on the issue of tutorials, we are proud to announce that as from MWM 005 we will be running a tutorial on MSM-Workstation. This has been possible thanks to the folks at Micronetics. Check out the news for the full story. Other name changes are to Wasted, now called Joking About and Feedback which has now been renamed to Mail Bag.
Next issue will be our first anniversary issue. For me this is the clearest example of how time flies. The survey that went online about a year ago, the work on MWM 001, the problems of how to get the issue on time and the question of whether there will be enough material to make an issue. While I must admit that no one issue up to now was a piece of cake and that every run to the 4th of September, December, March and June has its hiccups, at the end we’re always online.
The campaign to get M listed with various services seems to have gone down well, but there is no guarantee that we can achieve all goals within the time frame of a single issue. Thanks to feedback on your part we now have a number of areas we’re investigating. Until all get settled, we will be maintaining a page. Be sure to visit it regularly and make it a point to send those messages to the appropriate people (as many times as possible),
Keep those comments and ideas flowing.
Today…
How do you become immortal?
Conquer the world.
People involved in software development write down their own immortality. OK, maybe my claim is a bit overstated, but let’s face it, every one of your still-being-used programs is part of you in action. Don’t take acclaim to be equivalent to fame; other than Bill Gates, very few people in the software industry can claim such popularity.
Besides making our work last in time, programs also act as open history books. Whether you wrote the program or someone in your team created it originally, when you start reading the code, you can get an idea of the mood and state of being at the time. Documentation and methods of solution could narrate your level of expertise, your level of maturity, and whether on that day you were logically functional or not.
I went through this experience a few weeks ago. I had written a COBOL system, almost 15 years ago. I remember visiting the company for a short while, but once the software settled down, they had never contacted me with hiccups, or improvements (for accuracy’s sake, they had consulted me for an off-the-shelf report generator about a year later). When they called to ask me to have the software transferred to a new machine my first comment was "you’re still using it?" "Yes, the software is so well tailored and it’s sufficiently customizable that it serves our purpose well. We are changing the computer because of the word processing program". At the time I had installed the software on an 80286 computer, an ultra fast CPU (at that time) with a huge 40MB hard disk. Besides copying the programs, there were a few minor changes.
My first task was to install the sources and COBOL compiler and a backup of the data onto my PC. The compiler and source code were on 3.5" diskettes, but the 80286 computer only had a 5.25" drive. My options were either to call the hardware vendor, rig up the two hard disks on the Pentium machine and copy from one drive to the other or attempt a restore from floppies. I thought about the option of linking the two computers using a serial cable, but I didn’t have the slightest idea from where I could source such a program that ran on an 80286 machine. Since some computer vendors don’t take kindly to a computer under warranty being opened, I decided to pkzip everything to 5.25" floppies. At home I fished out the drive stashed with other memorabilia, cleaned it up, removed the cover off my PC, plugged in the power and data cable into this monster, altered the setup and presto soon had the data on my PC. As I started compiling all programs I had a look at the documentation. WordStar was quite limited by today’s standards. Looking at the dates, the software was written over a period of 6 months, with corrective maintenance / enhancements spanning another 3 months.
Inline and paper documentation rendered the task of understanding what the code did a relatively easy one. Geese, that code contained a range of moods in it, from genius coding ideas to horrible solutions to simple problems. Looking at the problem programs (those that have lots of horrible code), I confirmed my theory that if it gives you problems drop it and come back later (but don’t leave 15 years!). Since I believe that one shouldn’t change working code, history wasn’t altered in the latest update.
My little system had kept a company going, Without being aware, my work is still alive. It’s a nice feeling. Who knows, maybe in another 10 years time, the company will call me to transfer the programs and data to a new system. Will we still be using 3.5" diskettes?
Till next time…
I hope you enjoyed this little story and I would like to invite you to dig up your history. Pull out an old program and try to read your history from it. Have you matured, stayed the same or become a programming punk? If on the other hand you’ve taken up programming only recently, start writing and documenting. You’re building your own history.
Those who might ask why my story talked about COBOL rather then M should appreciate that my association with M dates back to recent time, but with this language I'm trying to build a great history.
Take Care
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