[nfbcs] first programs

[David Andrews]

Let me start by saying I am not a programmer, and tell you why.  I 
admire you guys.

While in Grad School I was supposed to write a routine to calculate 
standard deviation in fortran.  This would have been in 1978.  Next I 
tried performing the exercices in Apple Basic in a tutorial, to 
learn.  I would write something, then not have a clue as to how to 
debug.  I wasn't successful at the Fortran exercise either.  So I do 
other things!

Dave

At 06:24 AM 1/26/2014, you wrote:
>Cool stories. My first original program was written for my HS 
>computer class in BASIC on a TRS80 that used cassette tapes for 
>persistent storage and couldn't have had more than 512k of RAM. The 
>program calculated the Cartesian coordinates of the position and 
>velocity vectors of the (then) nine planets of the solar system at 
>1000 positions equally spaced on each elliptical orbit. The code 
>took several hours to run and the resulting printout was probably at 
>least 50 yards long. It was a great learning experience in managing 
>very limited memory resources.
>
> > On Jan 26, 2014, at 7:00 AM, nfbcs-request at nfbnet.org wrote:
> >
> > That's awesome. I have been working with perl a bit lately as 
> well. It has very impressive speed when it comes to manipulating text.
> >
> > I really enjoy using python. Its very powerful for scientific 
> research, especially when packages such as numPy and matplotlib are added.
> >
> > Kevin
> > ________________________________________
> > From: nfbcs [nfbcs-bounces at nfbnet.org] on behalf of Jim Barbour 
> [jbar at barcore.com]
> > Sent: Wednesday, January 22, 2014 5:27 PM
> > To: NFB in Computer Science Mailing List
> > Subject: Re: [nfbcs] first programs?
> >
> > Now that's cool!  I loved doing bio informatics in perl, and python
> > was my bread and butter language at Google <grin>
> >
> > Jim