[Edu-sig] Learn to Program in Ten Years

[Kirby Urner]

> Anybody see the Seinfeld episode where Kramer gets an intern?
> 
> Art
> 

I'm needing to catch up on Seinfeld -- lots of fun when I've caught it.

I catch up on stuff with Netflix a lot.  Did several seasons of Buffy back
to back, my first time to ever see this show.  Kitty Kelly says the Bush
family are more like the Sopranos than some other family (I forget which) --
but then, I've never seen a single episode of the Sopranos to date.
Netflix.

Relation to Python?  Well, it's probably thanks to my being a programmer for
well over 10 years now, that I've had so little time for television (true
rumor:  he loved Sesame Street).

I got started programming on an HP65, which was close to assembler (and some
like calculators today), then went through the end of the punch card era at
Princeton, but attracted like a moth to the flame to the interactive command
line, the terminal shell program.  360/370 VMS (virtural machine).  You
basically had a whole mainframe to drive, virtually.  This was not an
intuitive interface, and I ended up just sticking with APL.

However, my major at Princeton, after a fast gallop through the Woodrow
Wilson School, ended up being Philosophy, although to get all the
Wittgenstein I wanted (still want -- always satisfying), I had to go to the
other wing of 1879 Hall:  the Religion Department, with Vic Preller.  

Dr. Rorty was my thesis adviser however, along with some British guy, a
visiting prof I think he was.  We had to compromise on my grade, as my take
on LW has always been rather avant garde.  

And with Vic, I failed to turn in a final paper (just spaced it), so he had
no choice but to give me an F.  I still recall the chance meeting:  "Kirby,
why didn't you turn in your final paper and force me to fail you in my
course?"  He sort of bowed as he said it.  I felt like we were two Japanese
Sumarai.

But I never let philosophy vanquish my love of computer engineering, and as
it turns out, that was fortunate.  First of all, Wittgenstein was an
engineer at heart (and architect).  Second of all, my next big philosophers
were both engineer-designers as well.  Erhard and Fuller.  They definitely
weren't clones of each other, by a long shot.  So tuning in via both was an
amazing experience in stereophonics.  Sounded like trouble in Gotham City.
Kirby here, on the bat phone (philosophers love bats, especially the English
philosophers -- a favorite term of endearment of theirs:  batty).

So after awhile, I gravitated to Americans for Civic Participation, which
was a galvanize-the-voters operation.  Make 'em care about the issues.
Heighten their level of concern.  We achieved *nothing* like the levels
achieved in this last election.  Dang, this time Americans really registered
-- like, *really*.

Anyway, at Project Vote! (the popular front name), I used a Zorba on my desk
top (a portable CP/M jobber), while trucking over to some DC high rise (to
the extent DC has any) to deal with a COBOL DBA.  We'd feed in our requests,
and out would come gobs and gobs of mail labels, on fan-fold, straight from
the mainframe line printer.  The data had been entered earlier, at our
request, directly from public records.  Our goal:  get the disenfranchised
involved, because this is their country too.  I still believe that.

So, I now had college training in multiple languages from Princeton, and
field experience with both a desktop and mainframe.  That made me a valuable
asset in PDX, when I took a job with CUE (Center for Urban Education).  CUE
was set up in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, but a coalition of religious
organizations and the feds, to help with resettlement of refugees.  However,
by the time I joined in the mid 1980s, interest in the Southeast Asia
chapter was waning, and the funds were being diverted to bigger and better
wars ahead.  So CUE devolved back into EMO (Ecumenical Ministries of
Oregon), and I went into private practice, once again as a programmer.

Even up until now, I code for pay.  I help with the inner workings of a
large hospital system, working on the kind of application Eric Raymond
correctly identifies as very prevalent:  proprietary not for commercial
reasons, but because private organizations are highly vertical, meaning
their applications simply make no sense in an outside context.  What good
would my QUIPP be (Quinton Prolog Parser), if you don't have Quintons (at
this point so old as to not be vendor-supported -- upgrade in the works).
How many people have Quintons?  Usually, expensive cath lab apparatus is
special to hospitals.  So:  no QUIPP on Sourceforge.  It just wouldn't make
sense.  If other hospitals want the code, they're free to contact RHDS.

Likewise, I join projects where the code was never conceived of as open
source.  To many private business rules are hard coded.  Open source doesn't
mean exposing your internal operations to busy bodies.  It means writing
code that's generic enough to accommodate a lot of personal settings and
configuration decisions, once you've got it.  Like, go ahead and customize,
and don't feel like your Apache config file has to be on Sourceforge either
(like, who does that?).  Anyway, it's not my place to then turn around and
take something others paid for and worked on, and just decide it's a public
asset.  It's not mine to give away, basically.  So yes, I eyeball private
and proprietary code a lot.  But it's not stuff that'd make much sense
outside where and how it's currently used.

I use Python at RHDS, and for other jobs.  I used it to support Stu Quimby
with stellar graphics for StrangeAttractors, a dynamite toy that few know
of, understand, or grok -- except the kids who get it.

Kirby