#57 - Does anyone really program anymore?

I first saw a computer in the fall of 1972. It was an IBM 360/370 at Virginia Tech. It took up a room and only could be communicated with by using punch cards (IBM cards!). You had start the cards off by learning JCL (Job Control Language). Then you could actually program the beast to do something using Fortran (number cruncher)or Cobol(data cruncher) programming languages

Engineers learned Fortran (actually Fortran IV/Watfiv). Business types did Cobol. The original PCs from Apple and IBM had a language called BASIC that you could use to program them. Basic language was a subset of Fortran so wasn't too hard to pick up. I loved programing in Basic and wrote all kinds of game and database programs. I remember being asked to help our church at an auction. I whipped out a Basic program to keep track of what items we had to auction. Who won them and how much they owed. This was done on my Apple IIe that I dragged to the church with my Sony TV monitor. This would have been an early data base program, but customized to the auction.

With the advents of Windows, programming languages were developed to handle the graphic nature of the new operating systems. Visual Basic and C++ were developed to support graphic operating systems and became standards of the computer industry. Neither is very intuitive or easy to pick up. You have to have a computer bent to pursue either. The languages of the Internet are Java and HTML. Java was developed by Sun Microsystems to move TV type applications to the PC via a network. HTML is the graphic language that sits behind every web page.

So in 2007 the only people programming are those trained to program. I've heard of people teaching themselves C++, but JAVA is something completely different. Out of the blue the other day, I decided I wanted to write a program for the first time in a decade. What I first discovered was that there was no programming language on my PC. So I go to the Internet and find a free language Fortran95. Its the successor to the Fortran I grew up with, but has lots of hooks for Graphics so that the program can look good in Windows or on a MAC.

I'll let you know how my experiment goes.