Karen Rosenstiel
krosenstiel at comcast.net
Sat Dec 23 09:08:09 CST 2006
I remember noodling around with Clipper. I think I finally tossed out the diskettes a couple of years ago. Regards, Karen Rosenstiel Seattle WA USA -----Original Message----- From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of artful at rogers.com Sent: Friday, December 22, 2006 7:09 PM To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving Subject: [AccessD] Operating Systems, Progress, The Illusion of Progess, etc. I confess my age. I turned 59 about a month ago. I started out in 1982 using a Commodore 64 to which I had access once a week. The first program I wrote was a game of craps. It could accept 4 players and side bets in every direction. There was something very good about having to print out the source and not be able to modify it for a week. It caused one to think very carefully about one's revisions. In these modern instant-compile IDEs, that is gone. One simply writes code and clicks the right arrow to see if compiles correctly (not the same as Is it correct). I wouldn't wish the old days on young graduates, but there is something important that is gone: reading one's listings and deducing the flaws and not being able to adjust the code for a week, which causes one to rethink and revise and rethink and revise. Back in the old days, we had a term, "Cowboy coders". This meant code and load, no standards, load and go. Some of these people were fabulously brilliant (Brian Russell, Rob McConnell, Denny Diaz, Tom Rettig, Russell Freeland, Robert di Falco and some others that I knew personally). Brian and Rob were exceptional in their devotion to documentation, and no slight upon the others, but they were much more interested in getting it done than documenting it. One of my many computers runs DOS 6.22 with Clipper and Artful.Lib. Yes it was machine-specific, but yes, it was way way faster than any Windows equivalent, even with 2GB of RAM and 2GZ of speed. Granted, we were dealing with somewhat smaller problems back then (tables with only 5M rows rather that 100M rows), but we made do and it worked. It's fun to work on that old DOS 6.22 box now and then. Clipper was a fabulous program and I made a living using it and writing about it for about a decade. I benchmark it against modern things like Access or SQL 2005 and it holds its head proudly. I realize that the market has moved elsewhere, but to dismiss these previous achievements is equivalent to saying there is no value in Vivaldi or Bach. Only a complete idiot would say that. A. -- AccessD mailing list AccessD at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com