LETTER OF THE MONTH

Over the years…

Thank you for Mike Bedford’s series about old computer languages. For me it has been a trip down memory lane. I learnt FORTRAN at university as a physics undergrad but I also took the chance to learn other aspects of computing: getting into the operating system on the college’s CDC computers and taking courses on Algol-68, Pascal, Snobol and APL – usage of which was complicated by the lack of APL keyboards and those special characters!

None of this helped my university studies but having a knowledge of FORTRAN and APL helped me get my first job in the computing industry. One of the things we were doing was the creation of programs, written in APL, to aid the collection of data from clinical trials so it could be submitted for statistical analysis.

During this period I worked with a chap from Cocking and Drury and visited its offices. I don’t think I met Romilly Cocking but I did meet Brian Drury at an APL conference in Manchester in 1986.

A knowledge of Pascal proved useful when at a later job I was working with Borland’s Delphi ,which was based on that language. Later still I moved on to learn BASIC, C, VAX Macro Assembler, Perl, Python Java, Scala and various relational databases, and delve into the internals of both VAX VMS and Solaris Unix.

I have been a Linux user since some time before 2000, using various distros, but am currently using EndeavourOS and am struggling to learn Rust and Go; struggling not because of the complexity of the languages but because I have retired so I never seem to have the time…

John Huckle

Neil says…

Thanks for taking the time to write about your computing experiences and thank you for the kind words. Mike is finishing his series this issue with a look at how these classic languages have helped evolve modern ones – like Rust and Go – so hopefully that’s a fitting way to wrap it all up. Let me know if there’s anything else you’d like us to cover, classic or not. Feedback is really appreciated!