[net.nlang] Another language anecdote...that I survived

ignatz (07/22/82)

This doesn't address what people in other countries do with English-based
programming languages...but DOES touch what some do when they come to this
country...

Five years ago, I was a fresh college graduate with lotsa experience...in the
college environment. Thus, I took work where I could:

a) get experience, and
b) get paid a REAL salary.

Not necessarily in that order.

Thus, I took a job at an engineering consulting firm in Chicago--a Large one--
that will remain nameless. (I'm still on good terms with them, and wish to
remain so.  Those familiar with the business will guess who the company is by
the fact that they handle most of Commonwealth Edison's nuclear power plant
blueprints, equipment lists, etc.) In any case, my work there was, primarily,
design and implementation of an interactive order monitoring and flow control
system on a PR1ME 300. In (shudder) COBOL. But, things being as they were, the
more senior members of the team immediately dumped undesirable jobs on the
newest member. Me. One that I inherited was a ten-year old set of inventory
programs, in COBOL, that no one fully understood anymore.

One fine day, I'm tracking down a user gripe--er, request--which took me
into a part of the package that, surprisingly, hadn't been looked at for
almost the entire life of the package; specifically, a group of about 10
routines, comprising about 10,000 lines of COBOL code. When I ran the listings
off and tried to read them, the fun began. You see, it seems the programmer
was well-trained for someone in the '60s; the code was all well-documented,
variable names made sense and were described in loving detail, and the code
itself was modular and interspersed with suitable comments.

All in Indian. You know, the curry-and-rice type.

That's right, 10,000+ lines of code, with nothing but keywords in English.
Fortunately, my officemate was Indian, and understood the dialect; between the
two of us, the program was changed to suit the ridiculous request of the user.
But neither of us had the time or fortitude to translate that glop on our own.
So, bringing the state of affairs to the attention of our team leader,
we awaited his enlightened decision. Which was:

"What? You're sh---ing me. Well...It hasn't been updated in 6 years. Just
leave it.  Someone else will fix it. Don't mention this, OK???"
(Cigar pointed like .45) Right, sure, whatever you say.

Somewhere in this happy land the sun is burning bright...but in the bowels of
the Company machine lurks 10,000 lines of fine code for some bright, young,
idealistic person to find and...

					Dave Ihnat
					ihuxl!ignatz

thomas (07/24/82)

When I was in Norway, I noticed that people tended to make their variable
names Norwegain, ....  The computer they were running was built by a
Norwegian company, but the command language was English!  Guess there
aren't enough Norwegians buying computers.  Anyway, the Norwegian language
has 3 other letters (besides the usual 26).  Two of them were mapped onto
the [ and ] keys (I forget where the third was).  This made reading Pascal,
for example, very strange. (That is, the upper case were [ and ], lower case
were { and }.  The third letter might have been on \ and |.)

=Spencer