The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

The More Things Change: Fortran Edition

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2018-01-25

Technology improves over time. Storage capacity increases. Spinning platters are replaced with memory chips. CPUs and memory get faster. Moore's Law. Compilers and languages get better. More language features become available. But do these changes actually improve things? Fifty years ago, meteorologists used the best mainframes of the time, and got the weather wrong more than they got it right. Today, they have a global network of satellites and supercomputers, yet they're wrong more than they're right (we just had a snowstorm in NJ that was forecast as 2-4", but got 16" before drifting).

As with most other languages, FORTRAN also added structure, better flow control and so forth. The problem with languages undergoing such a massive improvement is that occasionally, coding styles live for a very long time.

32 comments - Last comment @ 2018-01-30

In $BANK We Trust

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2018-01-17

During the few months after getting my BS and before starting my MS, I worked for a bank that held lots of securities - and gold - in trust for others. There was a massive vault with multiple layers of steel doors, iron door grates, security access cards, armed guards, and signature comparisons (live vs pre-registered). It was a bit unnerving to get in there, so deep below ground, but once in, it looked very much like the Fort Knox vault scene in Goldfinger.

At that point, PCs weren't yet available to the masses and I had very little exposure to mainframes. I had been hired as an assistant to one of their drones who had been assigned to find all of the paper-driven-changes that had gone awry and get their books up to date.

18 comments - Last comment @ 2018-01-17

Whiling Away the Time

by snoofle in CodeSOD on 2018-01-09

There are two ways of accumulating experience in our profession. One is to spend many years accumulating and mastering new skills to broaden your skill set and ability to solve more and more complex problems. The other is to repeat the same year of experience over and over until you have one year of experience n times.

Anon took the former path and slowly built up his skills, adding to his repertoire with each new experience and assignment. At his third job, he encountered The Man, who took the latter path.

42 comments - Last comment @ 2018-01-15