Re: New keyword added: continue
Jeremy Cowgar wrote:
> Ken, do you have any major open source apps out there that I can see the
> source
> for? Or any open source applications you have contributed a major patches/code
> to that I can see?
While I believe in open source I've worked for proprietory outfits. Most of
my experimentation (not drugs! languages!) was prior to the last ten years
(in which I worked for just two companies... I left the first company, worked
a year for the second, then went back to the first.)
My contract with a little mom and pop outfit in Seattle (well, Silverdale)
called Squarerigger (they write fleet maintainance software and I hired with
them at the beginning of a DOS to windows period.) even required me to
shred any code I wrote for them after leaving the company.
The second companies I worked at was for a young man and I made mistakes
in handling the project. We had outlined a six month project which I was
totally on track in the 1st four month to finish. He called his company
NextPOS although it's something else now that he merged with a partner.
You should be able to find both on the web.
Then he decided he wanted the project broken up into a front end and a back
end. I should have told him, no and stuck with no. I should have told him
we need to get what I was working on done in the next few month so we could
be making money to justify my salary, then work on a second version. But I
didn't do that. He was the boss, young as he was, so I pulled out every
'back end' feature from the code that was almost completed and it was the
last time I worked on it (it's now sitting on one of his backup servers
somewhere) During the next 8 months he had me change the backend design
twice. He'd told his vendors about the product from the first and they
were calling everyday to find out it's status. Finally one weekend his
chief tech. asked me for my machines password to do some network maintenance
and when I came in monday I was locked out of my machine and the tech. didn't
come in that day. So I told the Sales VP (the only senior guy besides me
in the office that day) that I was taking the rest of the day off. I was
still steaming the next day, so I called in and said I was taking another
personal day (this was after a year of 60+ hour weeks.)
When I came in the next day, my friend and owner wasn't in, but had his
secretary/office manager let me know the bad news. Three days later I
left California and was back to work for Squarerigger in Seattle. That
first weekend there I worked overnights all weekend to fix their code for
a very important demo on monday with some city that I don't recall. It
wasn't enough time to fix everything (I could only insure that it didn't
actually blow up.) They made the sale.
I do have bits and pieces here and there in one language or another, but
nothing I'd be proud to show off. I was hoping to do that with my next
Euphoria project.
What I've learned has been by listening, reading, thinking and experiences.
I'm a self taught computer bum. Wrote my first HP2000F timeshared basic
program in 30 minutes after buying the language manual from the local
community college. Went to a trade school, but my buddy and I had to
teach the instructors about PMA on the Prime 750. Spent hundreds of dollars
on manuals I never used after leaving the school. Doesn't seem right.
Bought a commodore 64 (with disk drive and tape!) for $1300. It was
serial number 000000006xx in the year they sold 8 million (and the price
dropped to under $200.) Gave it away, but would kind of like to have it now.
I once thought FORTH could be the 'one true language' but that hallucination
ended (but I still look at things like REBOL.)
Wrote my first big project in NYC. dBase II multiuser (we had 13 286 machines
on 2 servers... in 1982? very cutting edge.) 10,000 lines of code and I
could visualize every line and every character... I actually edited the
code remotely and blind for a customer in Ohio. No way I could do that today.
I can hardly remember my name these days.
Even flew to Ohio and did some custom reports for them. Nursemaided a report
all night. When I got back to NYC my boss was mad about me giving things
away for free. I was young. Rewrote that report in BASCOM and it went from
16 hours to 30 minutes!
Bought my first copy of MASM back then, since I've bought Delphi, PowerBasic,
DarkBasic. I was going to say I never had to buy C, then I remembered I
bought a copy of Lattice C, which had a great upgrade policy right until
the moment they went out of business. 
My favorite CPU was the 6502 with
it's 13 addressing modes. I wrote an assembler for it in basic. Although
my first CPU was an RCA 1802 that ran at a few hundred kilohertz.
I've found I like features in many languages (ever ask yourself how would
I do this in assember when writing dBase code?)
I was also an air traffic controller and that's a story for another day.
Boy, did you open a can of worms! All you really need to know is that
I'm 49 but round that up to 50. I'm cranky. A rare INTJ.
But code? I don't got no stink'n code. You guys better get Euphoria up
to speed so I can ditch all these other language and just have fun.
Later I'll tell you my vision for the 'ONE TRUE LANGUAGE' which Euphoria
is a very significant part of.
Then I'll show you code... Did you see my PowerBASIC example... Please
don't make me code in PB. I'll be good. I promise. Please...
BTW, while I was away for a year they bloated a work order module from
about 10,000 lines to over 20,000 (adding accounting features that I had
argued years earlier during the design phase should have been foundational
to the product.)
Worked that over to less than 10,000 lines of cleaner, more functional and
easier to maintain code. Yes, I know that less is more. It's probably
got all it's bloat back now that I'm not watching over it anymore.
I
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