MartyMonroe

Authored Comments

I'm running OpenSuse 13.1 on my main box (I can't be bothered to upgrade it) and I installed Fedora 26 on my netbook a couple of weeks ago. I'm not enamored with either distro. They run but there is a lot of seems to be a load of nonsense on each that I could do without, systemd being just one. They are slow to boot too, although they are faster than the Windoze boxes I have to use at work.

My favourite distro ever was Redhat 7.1 Seawolf. I've still got an installation cd for it. It was fast and I ran it for years. If I was sure that I could get a modern web browser to run on it, I'd go back to it.

When I started as a programmer in the 1970s, entire suites were written in one or two languages. The most complex system that I worked on was, the suite that ran the building society that I worked for. The bits that controlled the equipment in the branches, was written in assembler, for speed. Most of the overnight processing parts, were written in COBOL, for ease of maintenance.

Of course, there were fewer languages then. The first 10 years of my career, was COBOL, assembler, MUMPS and RPGII. Now it's a mix of C, Perl, PHP, Javascript and whatever else comes my way. Give me a book of the language's syntax and I'll write you a program. It won't be the most efficient in terms of what the language can do, but it will work (well probably).