very-old-sw

Joined 1 year ago

Karma
3
Submissions
7
Member since
May 28
Programming since 1966. Some computers and systems used: IBM 1620, 7094, 360, 370, PDP 8, 10, 11, Prime, Motorola 6811, Nvidia/CUDA, Intel Xeon, IBM Quantum Computers. Some of the languages used: IBM Assembly, Fortran II, IV, DEC Macro 10, Lisp, Prolog, Snobol, C, Matlab, Mathematica, qiskit. Favorite language: C++. Least unfavorite OS: Linux.
View on Hacker News

Recent submissions

Comment · 11 days ago
I get service from San Diego Gas & Electric, have solar and powerwalls, and am part of Community Power's VPP. I am prohibited from charging my powerwall from the grid.
Comment · 11 days ago
It's possible in the Catskills in New York State (USA) but a proposed project there was killed by the greens. Who also killed fracking in NYS and a power line from Quebec to Mass and closed a nuclear plant and ....
Comment · 1 month ago
50 years ago, fortran iv had the "extended range of a do loop". You could jump out of a loop execute some code, then jump back in. Therefore 2 loops could execute the same out-of-loop code. It was useful; preprocessors like Flecs used it to emulate missing control structures.

ChatGPT says, "likely to need manual conversion". So no Fortran hasn't been stable. In another post I showed that C hasn't either.

Comment · 1 month ago
My C programs from a few decades ago, before namespaces were invented, no longer compile. However, the old executables still execute. The old C compilers are available but not supported; ChatGPT warns to expect trouble. Perhaps maybe there are compatibility switches that work correctly. Using them would require changing the makefiles.
Comment · 1 month ago
Reduce with barriers is essential (and amazingly powerful) in parallel functional programming languages like CUDA Thrust.
Comment · 1 month ago
reduce with barriers is essential in parallel functional programming. See the CUDA thrust package.
Comment · 1 year ago
Software engineers have known for decades that the choice of implementation language is one of the smaller costs in a large project. Also, I personally never use a language that is less than 20 years old. Life cycle costs:

post-release fixes: 50%.

pre-release testing and debugging: 25%.

requirements, design, implementation, etc: 25%

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton