Musical Interlude

I don’t know where this originally came from. It’s been on the internet for years.

When I find my code in tons of trouble,
Friends and colleagues come to me,
Speaking words of wisdom:
“Write in C.”

As the deadline fast approaches,
And bugs are all that I can see,
Somewhere, someone whispers:
“Write in C.”

Write in C, Write in C,
Write in C, oh, Write in C.
LOGO’s dead and buried,
Write in C.

I used to write a lot of FORTRAN,
For science it worked flawlessly.
Try using it for graphics!
Write in C.

If you’ve just spent nearly 30 hours
Debugging some assembly,
Soon you will be glad to
Write in C.

Write in C, Write in C,
Write in C, yeah, Write in C.
Only wimps use BASIC.
Write in C.

Write in C, Write in C,
Write in C, oh, Write in C.
Pascal won’t quite cut it.
Write in C.

Write in C, Write in C,
Write in C, yeah, Write in C.
Don’t even mention COBOL.
Write in C.

As part of a healthy diet. Other languages are available. BBC BASIC isn’t only for wimps. YMMV.

Thanks. The BBC BASIC sound commands are great.

I shall mention COBOL. I’ve only ever used it for one contract, recently mentioned elsewhere on Aldershot: mid-1970s, stock holding software for the 600 Group. Learned it, did three months’ work in it, forgot it. Also on that contract: learned IBM 3790 (allegedly smart terminal) Assembler, did three months’ work in it, forgot it. (Yes, a six-month contract. The sentences did not run concurrently. Learning 3790 involved a few days, I forget how many, in quite the worst hotel I’ve ever stayed in, in Harrow, Middx.)

Last place I ever used paper printouts of programs. Only a couple of years after the last place (University of Bradford) I used punched paper tape – we got rolls of that by airmail from NASA once a week, with the updated orbital data for the ATS-6 satellite.

The last time I heard COBOL mentioned for a job was back in the 90s, and I walked out of the interview. I thought I was up for a C role, but they had sneakily forgot to mention the other 4 letters.

That contract with 600 Group was 1976, IIRC. I thought I might use COBOL again, but I never did. Nor that stupid IBM3790 stuff, neither.

1985: something that called itself a “4th generation language” for a security laminated glass company. Don’t remember the name of the language now. Never used it again, either.

Only things since then have been ARM Assembler, BBC BASIC, and a C++ course, but never actually used the C++ in anger at all.

Let’s see for me it was BBC Basic on the school’s BBC B’s in 1982, then on my own Electron in 1984 which being half the speed drove me to get in to 6502 assembler in a big way.

At Brunel university I learnt a little Pascal and Fortran as part of the Physics and Computing course, but enough csh scripting to get me banned from the CS labs. I had a 6 month spell in industry working on non destructive testing equipment based on a 2" square BBC Micro compatible board (the Raspberry Pi of its day) using BBC Basic and 6502, I wasn’t there to do programming, but after I took home the bosses failed attempt at real-time eddy current sensor graphing for a demo testing Axel stubs to Ford the next day, rewrote it in assembler on my BBC Master that night, I was promoted to programmer.

Then I went to UCL and was on the first computer science course to teach C++ using the very same 1987 vintage CFront that’s still supplied with Norcroft today. After I saved up for my Archimedes I started writing RISC OS programs in C and ARM assembler. On getting my first job I used C and picked up 680×0 assembler for the Airbus projects. I also used C on various UNIX based project for the financial industry (Swiss inter bank gateways and encryption for SWIFT).

Unfortunately then I started a long a painful and frankly abusive relationship with Windows programming, initially with Visual C then Visual C++ on sonar survey cable testers and motor sport ECU programmers. I then got a job writing engine test cell control software for Windows to replace their Risc PC based product, but I ended up working to improve that so it was around for a long time after first Windows version came along. It was more Visual C++ for Windows in my next role making aircraft maintenance training rigs for the RAF (3/4 scale aircraft with moving control surfaces and landing gear – the biggest toy plane you could ever dream of playing with).

I then went on to work on accessibility software for the visually impaired, including porting the screen reader to Windows CE based iPaqs, while learning to fly real aircraft. In 2009 on moving to Cambridge the next language I picked up was C# working on testing encryption software for nCipher (a company started by the Van Someren brothers, before being sold to Thales and now part of Entrust), and after that Python. Ironically the Python prototype of one bit of software was faster then product C# code on mono.

At McLaren I started doing Perl but then ported everything to Python to write test suites for the F1 and Indycar ECUs, and maintained some tooling in C# no one else knew how to do. Now at Pexip we are using Python for both testing and production code of video conferencing systems, (although C is used for the video and audio processing), but for the first time since the mid 1990’s I’m now completely Windows FREE, and not writing assembler any more either.

Ooh, I wasn’t going back before 1976 and COBOL…

I started in 1967 with FORTRAN IV on an ICL1905E at Queen Mary College, University of London, then PDP8 Assembler, also at uni; Egtran (a dialect of FORTRAN) on a Honeywell mainframe at UKAEA; then assembler language on a Hewlett Packard minicomputer, I forget its name, at Bradford Uni; PDP8 assembler again at Bradford; teaching some unremembered dialect of BASIC on Exidy Sorcerer microcomputers at Shipley College; then that COBOL and 3790 rubbish; then BBC BASIC and 6502 assembler at Shipley College, then same again at Durham ITeC, and same again at Lews Castle College in Stornoway.

Since when it’s been RISCOS, BBC BASIC and ARM assembler all the way. Apart from a bit of Pascal with the OU, C++ at ARM, a bit of PERL, PHP…this and that…