ROTM in the Real World.

I spent most of the weekend inside the bowels of my Visual Basic dotNet monstrosity courtesy of the VS2005 IDE debugger. But I got it done. Step-step-step. I think my F8 key may have gone flat. I do not claim to be a dotNet expert especially after this weekend but I'm a heck of a lot closer to that than I was last week. Ouch.

I used to be able to claim Basic as one of my fluent languages although I'm no longer sure of that. VB4-5-6 is on another planet compared to VB2005. Similar thing happened to me years ago. I was a fairly decent Fortran programmer until I went to a college where they insisted you had to learn Algol. Ever hear of it? Probably not. Really the only differences were all the punctuation was different. It drove me crazy and the model 19 keypunch finished me off. I didn't want to work as a programmer ever again, especially if I wasn't being paid for it. The problem is that VB 6 is a heck of lot more different compared to VB dotNet than Algol was compared to Fortran.

Zoom ahead a bunch of years (no I'm not telling) and my Engineering Manager tells me that he's really tired of all the engineers he's got that have turned into programmers. Well guess what buddy, they've been teaching engineers to program from at least the late 1960's. And I thought I was a dinosaur!

In any case if I ever get to test a time machine and I have to go back to my undergraduate days, I'm taking a laptop and a couple of batteries, a few spare hard drives, a CDROM of Linux and another of the gcc compiler with me and I'll make a killing. And maybe I can encourage a certain Willy G to stay in Harvard and just become another damn MBA.