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| How about maybe it means something else by Commander Tansin A. Darcos 07/13/2013, 12:12am PDT | ||||
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| First, I didn't notice it was several years old.
Second, well, I've been a computer programmer for over 34 years; for some of you, I've probably been writing programs since before you were even born. Yes, we had terminals back in 1978 but often the schools didn't. You typed up your assignments on punched cards, put a deck, sometimes of 600-1000 cards in a hopper, pushed the start button, and the reader read it. If the system was lightly loaded, you might get your job back in 15-30 minutes, sometimes you would have to wait 3 hours, sometimes you submitted it and came back the next day. Fortran is a language nobody uses much, but was very popular back then. The syntax for a loop is of the form (in all upper case): DO 15 I = 1 , 20 15 CONTINUE Which means, repeat from the DO statement through line number 15, with I as the loop control variable that varies from 1 by 1 on each loop, all the statements for 20 times. But note, FORTRAN ignores blanks. The following statement is also legal: DO 15 I= 1 . 20 Which means, Assign the value 1.20 to the variable DO15I . This will compile and execute without syntax error, but you won't get the right result. Now, when you're used to waiting anything up to a whole day to get a run back, you get very anal retentive at making sure you haven't made a mistake. Now, compiles are all but instantaneous on a 3GHZ Wintel PC and the compiler will find this stuff, but when you're forced to look for this sort of thing or you learn to start watching for these things or you wait a long time as a penalty, you get very good at spotting missing or incorrect punctuation. Especially when you spend upwards of two years slaving over a hot keyboard on an IBM 029 keypunch you learn to check carefully. When you're used to having to watch for the tiniest error or face hours of penalty having to wait a long time for a batch job to be accepted to recompile, you start to get really good at noticing small errors. I don't think it means I have autism, I strongly suspect it means I trained myself to subconsciously watch for missing characters. And I suspect a lot of programmers who were around from the days before PCs were available and then later, so fast that a recompile of a 250,000 line Pascal program takes 13 seconds, could do the same thing. Third, when Turbo Pascal Version 3 came out, I had already known Pascal for at least five, maybe ten years. So, there's this guy in the terminal room who has been debugging his program of about 900 lines for on the order of five hours and couldn't figure out what was wrong. It keeps telling him there's an error. So, I said, let me take a crack at it. About 1/2 way through I put a simple "BEGIN END." after a procedure; this ends the compilation and anything after the period is ignored. His program compiles without error. I delete this, and I go about 1/2 way between that point and the bottom of the program and insert the same thing. I get the same error he does. So I keep splitting the difference and what happens? In about 3-5 minutes I find where he put an extra { on a line; this is the start of a comment, which continues to the next } or the end of the program. Since he didn't have any comments, his program was too short. I found his error in his program in 5 minutes after he'd spent 5 hours and still couldn't find it. Does that mean I have Asperger's or autism or does it just mean I'm a damn good programmer who knows the language? Fourth, I did assembly language, on mainframes and minicomputers. After a while, you get used to being able to read a lot of the opcodes by the hex or octal value depending on the machine, even now, if I see "90ECD00C" that's the code for the start of a subroutine on an IBM mainframe, it means "STM 14,12,12(13)" or store registers 14,15,0 and 1 through 12 starting at address 12 off the contents of register 13. I can still remember that years later, because I had to look through dumps all the time for years to figure out what's going on. It doesn't necessarily mean I have autism, unless autism is something you can acquire by being very particular about how things are used and being very attentive to errors so you don't get slowed down by missing them. Fifth, I was doing tech support as a contractor employee for a government agency, and I'm talking to one of our people in Florida, who wants to be able to use the main phone line to dial out to collect e-mail from our internal system, but the modem keeps getting programmed to answer the phone. This was one of our regional offices where the public is going to call in, and they can't justify a separate phone line just to collect e-mail. He hadn't been able to get anyone to figure out what was wrong. I said I could; he was a little surprised that I flat out said that I could, no excuses. I told him I'd call him back. I went through the manuals, and it took me 90 minutes, but I found where the command was to tell the program he was using not to set the modem for answer. I called him up and walked him through the one-time instruction to reset the program so it only dialed out, it didn't set the modem to answer. The next day he called back, he said I was the first person in 90 days who had solved his problem, and I did it in 90 minutes. He was so impressed he wrote me up and I got a commendation for my good work. Does this mean I have autism or Asperger's or does it just mean I know how to look on the shelves for and to read software manuals? |
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