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10 Things I Hate About You, COBOL

Actually, I don't hate COBOL. I just couldn't resist the blog title. But there are some things about it that I find annoying. 1. All Variables are Global Global variables make it difficult to track down bugs; when a variable can be changed at any point in the code it's hard to tell what happened. In COBOL, every variable is a global variable. 2. No Parameter Passing In most languages, you can pass parameters to subroutines. But you can't do that in COBOL. So how do you move data to a subroutine for processing in COBOL? You put it in … global variables. 3. No Returning Values Just like you can’t pass values to a subroutine, you can’t return values from one either. You can, however, store the results in…global variables. 4. Verbosity They say it was designed so non-technical people could read it. Problem is, non-technical people don't read it. I've worked in three shops that used COBOL. None of them had non-programmers looking over COBOL code. S...
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Mr. Leatherwood Was Right

When I was in college, there was an I.T. instructor named Mr. Leatherwood. I remember several tidbits of information that he gave us. A Programmer, On Average, Only Writes About 10-12 Good Lines of Code a Day I’ve found that to be true. Meetings, debugging, talking with users, fixing bugs, setting up source control, writing documentation, etc., all take up time during the day. Some days you'll write 100s of lines. Others you'll write none. The I.T. Department Is The One That Knows What Is Going On In The Organization Because they write the programs for all the different areas, they are the ones who know what each part of the organization is doing. You Can Do More Than You Think You Can This was a big one for me.  It's not something that he directly said. He would gave us a programming assignment one day with a due date of a few weeks. Then, before that was due, he would give us another assignment. And then another. I thought "There's no way I can get all of t...
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Trying Out Markdown Monster

I started looking at desktop based software for editing blog posts again. I had looked at Open Live Writer (on Windows) and Mars Edit (on Mac). But neither of them felt quite right. I've been reading Rick Strahl's blog for several years, and remembered that he had written a program -- Markdown Monster --for editing markdown that could be used for creating blog posts. This is a test post I'm creating with Markdown Monster. Here is some sample code: Public Class Form1 Private Sub Button1_Click(sender As Object, e As EventArgs) Handles Button1.Click ' The following is a sample For i = 1 To 100 Console.WriteLine(i.ToString()) Next End Sub End Class And here's some C# code: private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { // The following is a sample for (int i = 1; i <=100; i++) { Console.WriteLine(i.ToString()); } } Markdown Monster has ...
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