Re: The joy of FORTRAN

On 3/9/25 12:51 PM, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

On 2025-03-09, Robert Riches <spamtrap42@jacob21819.net> wrote:
 

A friend of mine has a favorite question:
>
         What could possibly go wrong?
>
Maybe that question should be asked more often.

 Someone once said that good programmers are spoilsports.
Rather than fawning over the wonderful things technology
can do, they're constantly looking for ways it can go wrong.

   You HAVE to have a top-rate "doom detector" to be
   a decent programmer.
   Michelangelo always said the statue was just waiting
   inside the marble block, you just had to chip away
   all the wrong bits. This is not SO different from
   writing software. The perfect app IS trapped inside
   megabytes of code, but you have to chip away all the
   bad bits of code to get at it.  :-)
   Judging by all the buffer-overflow and injection
   attacks STILL being seen daily it seems there are
   not as many 'decent programmers' as there used to be.
   In 1959 this was less of an issue, but now that just
   EVERYTHING is computer/net ....
   When I deposit checks at the bank I do have my little
   card, but ALSO have a 'deposit slip'. Some of the
   younger tellers sometimes have that "???" look when
   they see it. However, I'd still like to have both
   check AND physical slip scanned in ... those inked
   acct numbers cannot be affected so easily by operator
   mis-keying  :-)