Coding aid

[GrahamPlatt]

Interesting article on an “AI” which assists in writing code (or at least, in searching out appropriate snippets from others).
Called copilot (which is also the name of some GPS software I used to have).

[servodude]

Interesting article on an “AI” which assists in writing code (or at least, in searching out appropriate snippets from others).
Called copilot (which is also the name of some GPS software I used to have).

The idea gives me conniptions!

But that's because I've seen what autocomplete and shonky refactoring tools did to Java
SD: "Why's that method there?"
JAVA-GUY:"The IDE added it when I created the class"
EXIT pursued by a rubber duck

I can't see how it's not just going to add more "cargo cult cut-and-pasters" in to the pool of what passes for programmers these days
- just get a rubber duck!

That said: I'll happily read the article if you post the link

-sd

[GrahamPlatt]

That said: I'll happily read the article if you post the link

-sd

Ah! Well spotted. Sorry, here it is: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... -of-us-all

Hi everyone

It crossed my mind if it might help a ten year old with her website coding.

[servodude]

That said: I'll happily read the article if you post the link

-sd

Ah! Well spotted. Sorry, here it is: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... -of-us-all

Ahhh so it's an AI fed from the infinite monkeys in the gitHub barrel
- we're doomed! but not before it's exposed a bunch of bad practice
(The committed root password thing actually happened to me once; a contractor had baked it in to his code text and we discovered when I typed it by accident in to a search box - and got a hit on Google)

I'll give it a whirl though and see how it goes

I'm imagining an updated clippy "it looks like you're writing a Duff's Device" what can go wrong?!

-sd

[UncleEbenezer]

But that's because I've seen what autocomplete and shonky refactoring tools did to Java
SD: "Why's that method there?"
JAVA-GUY:"The IDE added it when I created the class"
EXIT pursued by a rubber duck
-sd

Brings back memories of the early days of Java, and playing with Sun's Java Studio and Workshop tools.

[servodude]

But that's because I've seen what autocomplete and shonky refactoring tools did to Java
SD: "Why's that method there?"
JAVA-GUY:"The IDE added it when I created the class"
EXIT pursued by a rubber duck
-sd

Brings back memories of the early days of Java, and playing with Sun's Java Studio and Workshop tools.

Frustratingly it has actually become a decent language (starting from about Java 8)
- but you wouldn't know if from the autogenerated boilerplate everywhere

-sd

[jamesbone]

But that's because I've seen what autocomplete and shonky refactoring tools did to Java
SD: "Why's that method there?"
JAVA-GUY:"The IDE added it when I created the class"
EXIT pursued by a rubber duck
-sd

Brings back memories of the early days of Java, and playing with Sun's Java Studio and Workshop tools.

Thank you very much!!! It works!! I still can't open the files... but is progress
This is the file with the results but they are all .MSAS .MMDL .MANM .MCAN .MSUR .MPSY and some .dat that i though i can open with Noesis but nope..

[scotia]

Probably before most of you programmers were around, a software package called "The Last One" was launched in the early 80s. It was claimed to be the only software tool that a programmer would require. It involved selecting options from menus, and these were automatically transformed into a BASIC (language) program. For some reason most programmers felt that it was the last one they would consider using - and so it became the late one.
There is a description on Wiki if you look for The Last One Software. Have a look at reference 2 - which I quote below:-

A terminal case for programmers, New Scientist, 13 Aug 1981, Page 410, ..Its creator is David James, a bankrupt former millionaire with only a week's formal training in computers. In partnership with Scotty Bambury, a Sommerset tyre dealer...

[servodude]

Probably before most of you programmers were around, a software package called "The Last One" was launched in the early 80s. It was claimed to be the only software tool that a programmer would require. It involved selecting options from menus, and these were automatically transformed into a BASIC (language) program. For some reason most programmers felt that it was the last one they would consider using - and so it became the late one.
There is a description on Wiki if you look for The Last One Software. Have a look at reference 2 - which I quote below:-

A terminal case for programmers, New Scientist, 13 Aug 1981, Page 410, ..Its creator is David James, a bankrupt former millionaire with only a week's formal training in computers. In partnership with Scotty Bambury, a Sommerset tyre dealer...

We've a guy in his 70s who comes in to do some stuff in the office and the only programming he'll touch is LabView - which I thought died in the 90s (I'd had to submit some code "printouts" for a thesis where i'd used it and I would have liked to have seen their reactions to those)

It gets the job done - but it strangely gives me the sensation that cartoon characters are going to pop out at me

I also once had to do a course in Occam - which was a language dead before it really began (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam_(programming_language))
- because the transputers it was designed for didn't really set the world on fire
- had some interesting pardigms though even if they're better left to your compiler

- sd

[scotia]

We've a guy in his 70s who comes in to do some stuff in the office and the only programming he'll touch is LabView - which I thought died in the 90s (I'd had to submit some code "printouts" for a thesis where i'd used it and I would have liked to have seen their reactions to those)

- sd

I was told that in a certain major bank, there were two old guys on-site who spent their times reading books, and snacking. They were the only guys that knew anything about some key software package that they had written many years ago - and they were employed on standby, should anything go wrong.

[AleisterCrowley]

Probably COBOL.....

[moorfield]

I was told that in a certain major bank, there were two old guys on-site who spent their times reading books, and snacking. They were the only guys that knew anything about some key software package that they had written many years ago - and they were employed on standby, should anything go wrong.

There are still an awful lot of monolithic legacy systems in major banks, COBOL etc. that need supporting you'd be surprised. I worked on an interface once that converted between decimal amounts and pounds, shilling, pence because that's what the downstream system used (it held very long dated bond positions from the 60s/70s). Management just wouldn't dare touch it until all those bonds matured, so they just kept wrapping more and more crip around it.

[Hallucigenia]

I was told that in a certain major bank, there were two old guys on-site who spent their times reading books, and snacking. They were the only guys that knew anything about some key software package that they had written many years ago - and they were employed on standby, should anything go wrong.

Don't knock it - Micro Focus have turned that attitude into a £bn business...

[AleisterCrowley]

Ah, the other big company in Newbury...

[scotia]

OK - I think you all guessed Cobol, and I think you were probably correct. Going back over thirty years, it was interesting how some University Computer Science departments taught Cobol courses, while others would have nothing to do with the language - although it was obviously widely used.
I have seen it described as being a software dinosaur which didn't yet know it was extinct.
I remember dipping my toe into COBOL, using Utah COBOL on a PC, more than thirty years ago. I have just located this work on my current PC - in the directory obsolete_software.

[Infrasonic]

I've read in the tech press that people with Cobol skills can earn a fortune with the legacy mainframes still in use in the enterprise world.

[JohnB]

The software I wrote 30 years ago to forecast the weather is AFAIK still being used many times a day on the fastest computer in Britain. I expect my successors wrote changes to its Fortran today.

[UncleEbenezer]

Probably COBOL.....

That was mainstream. Probably still is in some places: doesn't Micro Focus make good money[1] supporting it?

Sometime in the 1980s my then-employer (a "body-shop" company) supplied my body to a client using ICL crap. To tick boxes about knowing the platform, they sent me on a week's course. Turned out I was the only person on that course employed in the private sector.

The course turned out to be entirely in COBOL.
This was the first and only time in my life I had encountered COBOL.
The rest of them routinely used COBOL.
But I still scored the top marks on the course.
The job I was being sent to do involved no COBOL whatsoever, though I had to wade through lots of the world's worst FORTRAN.

[1] Helps offset the money they lose on the HPE poison.

[AleisterCrowley]

I started off at school on BASIC (of course) then when I went into higher education we ended up doing Pascal, which seems to have disappeared without trace (cue loads of people saying something about Delphi, which is another closed book to me)
All I've done in 30 years of 'work' is use Excel/VBA, and a brief stint programming in IDL(Interactive Data Language) - some odd specialist language used for dealing with big arrays and stuff, currently a Harris Geospatial product...

[stewamax]

COBOL did at one time have a repertoire of built-in report writer and sort commands which were a quick way to generate straightforward 'select, sort, report' jobs. Then the features vanished, so more writers cramp or RSI.

SIMULA on the other hand - the object-oriented version of ALGOL 60 - was taut, elegant and a pleasure to write, especially if you were building complex railway area simulations as I was at the time. No coding aids needed as everything was in the language (I/O was a bit of a challenge)