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With such a large selection of programming languages it can be difficult to choose one for a particular project. Reading the manuals to evaluate the languages is a time consuming process. On the other hand, most people already have a fairly good idea of how various automobiles compare. So in order to assist those trying to choose a language, we have prepared a chart that matches programming languages with comparable automobiles.
Assembler
A Formula I race car. Very fast, but difficult to drive and expensive to maintain.
FORTRAN II
A Model T Ford. Once it was king of the road.
FORTRAN IV
A Model A Ford.
FORTRAN 77
A six-cylinder Ford Fairlane with standard transmission and no seat belts.
COBOL
A delivery van. It's bulky and ugly, but it does the work.
BASIC
A second-hand Rambler with a rebuilt engine and patched upholstry. Your dad bought it for you to learn to drive. You'll ditch the car as soon as you can afford a new one.
PL/I
A Cadillac convertible with automatic transmission, a two- tone paint job, white-wall tires, chrome exhaust pipes, and fuzzy dice hanging in the windshield
C
A black Firebird, the all-macho car. Comes with optional seat belts (lint) and optional fuzz buster (escape to assembler).
ALGOL 60
An Austin Mini. Boy, that's a small car.
Pascal
A Volkswagon Beetle. It's small but sturdy. Was once popular with intellectuals.
Modula II
A Volkswagon Rabbit with a trailer hitch.
ALGOL 68
An Astin Martin. An impressive car, but not just anyone can drive it.
LISP
An electric car. It's simple but slow. Seat belts are not available.
PROLOG/LUCID
Prototype concept-cars.
Maple/MACSYMA
All-terrain vehicles.
FORTH
A go-cart.
LOGO
A kiddie's replica of a Rolls Royce. Comes with a real engine and a working horn.
APL
A double-decker bus. Its takes rows and columns of passengers to the same place all at the same time. But, it drives only in reverse gear, and is instrumented in Greek.
Ada
An army-green Mercedes-Benz staff car. Power steering, power brakes and automatic transmission are all standard. No other colors or options are available. If it's good enough for the generals, it's good enough for you. Manufacturing delays due to difficulties reading the design specification are starting to clear up.
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Strange job advertisement in Tuesday's Age or Australian:
[...]
Salary ,999 - ,400 depending on experience.
Plenty of incentive for experienced programmers here.
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Why I like the IBM 3090:
First, there's the wonderful operating system, VM/SP which has SO many advantages! Here are some of my favorites!
1. All of your files are in the same directory, you don't have to worry about subdirectories and other nonsense,
2. For file names, not only do you get a file name, but you also get a file type AND a file mode, with the name and type each being an astounding 8 characters, plus a 2 character file mode, way more than I ever had on my Apple II,
3. If you create a small file, it automatically makes sure it takes up one 4K block on your disk, so you can add up to 4K of data to the same file and not take any more disk space!!! WOW!!!!!
4. When you get an account you get an ENTIRE cylinder to yourself, an amazing 465K, which is more than my 5 1/4 inch, single sided, low density PC disk,
5. If a FORTRAN file is too long (250 lines) to compile on your disk because the temp files fill up your cylinder, all you have to do is unlink your A disk, create a big temporary disk, attach that as your A disk, attach your old A disk as another disk, copy the source file to the new A disk, then compile it,
6. You never have to worry about background processes, redirection, or piping because the 3090 doesn't have any! Or command histories!
7. Or here (WSU) we are privileged to have RESLIM, which makes sure that you don't use any more CPU time than you want to or have to,
8. We also have system administrators who also make sure we don't use more CPU than we have to, not to mention they tell us what we can and can not do, and what they think they legally can and can not do, such as maintenance on our accounts to make sure there is nothing wrong with any of our personal files,
9. If any files have sat in your reader/mailbox too long, they will automatically be discarded for you,
10. And finally, all of the USEFUL on-line help! All you have to know is the name of the command and whether it is in CP or CMS or SOFTWARE or one of the other help menus, and you can get a GREAT description of that command AND some examples how to use it like you would want to every day!
Not only is the operating system fantastic, they have an AWESOME full screen editor, XEDIT. Boy, it's quite a step up from EDLIN on my PC! Just look how powerful it is:
1. If you want to move your cursor to the middle of the screen, all you do is hold down the arrow keys until you get there.
2. If you wanna delete a whole bunch of characters in the middle of the line all you have to do is hold down the DELETE key until they all magically disappear.
3. If you wanna insert something, all you do is hit the INSERT key and type in what you want, unless it's too long for that line, then all you gotta do is split the line where you want by using the PF11 key, which if you are on a VT100 is just an ESC minus sign.
4. After you do any commands in that neat prefix area, your cursor almost always goes back to the command line at the bottom of the screen.
5. You never have to worry about anything nasty like tab keys, there are no tab stops by default (unless you wanna set them).
6. And, unless you tell it otherwise, XEDIT always creates fixed length lines of 80 characters, so if you ever want to put more stuff on the same line sometime later, there is room for it!!
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Three NASA engineers, one from headquarters in Washington, one from the Johnson center in Houston, and one from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena were discussing whether it was better to have a wife or a mistress.
The HQ guy said it was better to have a mistress, because they are more understanding of the long absences required of a NASA employee. The Johnson guy retorted, "Oh, no, one must always follow proper rules and procedures, and marriage is the proper procedure, so it is better to have a wife."
The JPL engineer replied, "No, it is better to have both. That way, you can tell your wife that you're with your mistress, your mistress that you're with your wife, and go to the lab and work."
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The UNIX Philosophy
Ken Thompson has an automobile which he helped design. Unlike most automobiles, it has neither speedometer, nor gas gauge, nor any of the other numerous idiot lights which plague the modern driver. Rather, if the driver makes a mistake, a GIANT ? lights up in the center of the dashboard. "The experienced driver," says he, "will usually know what's wrong."
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The personal computer industry was rocked recently when Penthouse Magazine merged with Commodore Computers. The joint venture will introduce a new product, the Penthouse PET, billed as a "VERY personal computer designed to satisfy a variety of users' needs."
Planning a new line of velvet and satin software, the company's Times Square R&D facility is working on applications packages for the home entertainment market. One of the niftier applications is a word processing package called SLEAZY WRITER which can generate an almost infinite number of Penthouse Magazine Forum letters using a vocabulary of only fifty words. Other packages include Accounts Painable, Visi-Crotch, a Eunuchs Operating System, Electronic Male, and a graphics package featuring 200 different shades of pink. A user friendly language called VIRGIN will guide first timers every step of the way.
One of the main research thrusts is to develop a warm man-machine interface. According to Penthouse sources, erotica is simply an extension of ergonomics. The PET terminal has been designed with a ribbed exterior and comes in a variety of tropical colors. California publisher Blue Boy is offering an optional AC/DC power supply. A company spokesman also lauded the PET's portability. "With moisture resistant packaging, you can take your PET anywhere - you can go swimming with it, take it into the Jacuzzi, or even go to bed with it."
In addition, the Penthouse PET will be able to interface with the next generation of interactive video discs. Users will be able to pick from a wide variety of fantasies with the aid of a groan-activated selector. Of course the system comes with a joy stick as well.
For the party market, Penthouse has developed a Local Area Network called ORGYNET, which the company claims is a breakthrough in compatibility. With the ORGYNET input-output port, you can stick your plug right in. A cluster controller has also been designed to handle the interactive needs of up to four users at one time. Unlike other LANs which use a single coaxial cable, ORGYNET features a tangle of coax (OEM'd from Cox) and uses TSMA (tactile sense multiple access) to allow up to 69 users to interact with the system and each other simultaneously. Although Penthouse reports that ORGYNET can sustain prolonged interactive sessions, insiders report that the throughput peaks after about 30 seconds.
The PET will be distributed by Frederick's of Hollywood, local news stands, and Sears. Penthouse is also strong in service and maintenance; S&M will be handled by a nationwide fleet of vans equipped with a variety of whips, chains, and other tools.
The new generation of personal computers was totally anticipated by the Yankee Group consultants. From a limp beginning, the erotic information processing market has been rising in recent years and is now quite firm, although the recession has created some soft spots. Penthouse's strategy is to use its solid orders to enter the soft markets, jack up production when things get going, and pull out just before competitors come rising into the market.
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IBM and DEC decided to have a boat race, on the Thames, following the famous Oxford vs. Cambridge course.
Both teams practiced hard, and came the big day, they were as ready as they could be.
IBM won by a mile.
Afterwards, the DEC team were very downhearted, and a decision was made that the reason for the crushing defeat had to be found, so a working party was set up to investigate and report.
Well, they had everybody on the working party, Sales, Systems Engineering, Marketing, Customer Education, Field Service, the whole lot, and after 3 months they came up with the answer, and the working party co-ordinator gave his summary presentation.
"The problem was," he said, "that IBM had 8 people rowing and 1 steering, whereas we had 1 person rowing and 8 steering."
The working party was then asked to go away and come up with a plan to prevent a recurrence the following year, for DEC's pride had been damaged, and another defeat was not wanted.
2 months later, the working party had worked out a plan, and the coordinator gave his (customarily brief) summary--
"The guy rowing has got to work harder"
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Microsloshed Corporation of Smoke'em, Washington introduces the most fantabulous operating system overlay ever, a high-performance GUI (Generally Useless Interface) that will transform your measly old command-line driven PC into a state-of-the-art multitasking system!
M I C R O S L O S H E D W A L L S
o Microsloshed Walls frees you from the worries of incompatible hardware--in fact, if any part of your computer is in the tiniest respect different from an original IBM PC, Microsloshed Walls will pretend it doesn't exist and lock up when you try to install the drivers--automatically!
o Complicated and cumbersome command-line functions have been replaced by simple, intuitive mouse-driven commands without confusing options or user-burdening functionality.
o Microsloshed Walls version 3.0 is a major step forward--boldly abandoning the restraints of compatibility with either DOS or Walls 2.9 applications while not making you waste your time learning new features or capabilities.
o Conventional DOS programs are limited to a mere 640K of memory; Microsloshed Walls will use up every last byte of memory on your computer and more!
o Microsloshed Walls provides your programs with a uniform user interface so simple and easy to use that all your applications will look and act exactly the same. Whether you're using a telecommunications package or a compiler, you'll be completely unable to tell them apart!
o Several of the functions of the Microsloshed applications you've grown to love under DOS will still work some of the time under Walls and a variety of Microsloshed products are very nearly supported by Microsloshed Walls including Expell, QuirkC, QuirkBASIC, QuirkPascal, and QuirkRATFOR.
o The popular word processing program Microsloshed Wart has been fully updated and modified just for Walls, making it totally unlike Microsloshed Wart while still retaining the same name.
o Microsloshed Walls includes its own special version of QEMMMM (Quirky Extraneous Massive Memory Multi-Mangler) converting your system's extraneous memory into impacted memory which can be more efficiently wasted by Walls.
We guarantee that, when you install Microsloshed Walls on your computer, you'll kiss your old DOS prompt goodbye. In fact, after just one session with Microsloshed Walls, you may never use any of your old programs again.
Microsloshed. Software that makes your computer obsolete.
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Two lions escape from the zoo. They decide that they'd better split up, but agree to meet three months later at a given spot.
Three months go by and they meet at the appointed place. One is very skinny and the other appears very robust.
The Robust One (TRO): What happened to you? You look terrible!
The Skinny One (TSO): When we split up, I went to a nearby village. All I did was to eat one small person, and the villagers got very upset. They started chasing me with guns! I've been on the run ever since and haven't had a thing to eat since then.
TRO: That's too bad.
TSO: What about you? You seem to be doing well.
TRO: Well, I made my way to Digital headquarters in Maynard.
I've been eating a manager a week, and nobody seems to notice.
I think this could apply to most conglomerates.
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DOS 5.0 will have a command called SETVER, which will insure compatibility with other DOS versions. For instance, if you have one of those old programs that would run best under DOS 2.0, you would issue the command SETVER 2.0, and DOS would reset itself for complete compatibility.
The first thing I am gonna do when I get DOS 5.0? Why, of course, I'm gonna put SETVER 5.01 in my AUTOEXEC, so that I won't have to put up with all those annoying bugs!
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A computer engineer, a systems analyst, and a programmer were driving down a mountain when the brakes gave out. They screamed down the mountain, gaining speed, and finally managed to grind to a halt, more by luck than anything else, just inches from a thousand foot drop to jagged rocks. They all got out of the car.The computer engineer said, "I think I can fix it."The systems analyst said, "No, I think we should take it into town and have a specialist look at it."The programmer said, "OK, but first I think we should get back in and see if it does it again."
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