The Programmer and the Elves: a Fairy Tale(pigsandfishes.com)
pigsandfishes.com
The Programmer and the Elves: a Fairy Tale
http://pigsandfishes.com/filks/mikefilk/progelves.html
7 comments
I'm turning 30 this year (eek). My first "computer job" was as operator/programmer for a school district in the East Bay, while I was still in high school.
While I was there, over the course of a few nights I wrote, in COBOL, a program that would read in the digital punch cards on their mainframe and a set of variables passed to it, interpret some codes in the data for the embedded variables, and then spit out a temporary static digital punch card for the next job being run.
It was challenging because COBOL doesn't understand strings; I ended up using some horrible hack involving the Unisys string/unstring system calls.
13 years later, I'm starting to build a business on doing impossible little things for companies. It's kinda fun. Stressful, but rewarding. :-)
While I was there, over the course of a few nights I wrote, in COBOL, a program that would read in the digital punch cards on their mainframe and a set of variables passed to it, interpret some codes in the data for the embedded variables, and then spit out a temporary static digital punch card for the next job being run.
It was challenging because COBOL doesn't understand strings; I ended up using some horrible hack involving the Unisys string/unstring system calls.
13 years later, I'm starting to build a business on doing impossible little things for companies. It's kinda fun. Stressful, but rewarding. :-)
I'm right there myself. Good luck. :)
Having done at least one thing that I thought was "impossible", I now expect myself to do the impossible ever after. I don't give up without trying, anyway.
Everyone should do something impossible at least once in their lifetimes.
Everyone should do something impossible at least once in their lifetimes.
Out of curiosity, what was this impossible thing?
I was expecting the elves to come back charging exurbanite consulting fees to maintain a system no one else could understand...
huh, I didn't think it would be a social lesson, I was expecting something more along the lines of: use compilers and high-level languages and don't care what your object code looks like
Try shmrc, rnbo, and mmd, and make sure that mmd is an integer.