Cobol as icon continued
Partial reprint with extension.

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The Github/Room 101 mindset is the deep terminal disease of recent times. It's a major instance of the psychopathic need to obliterate the universe.

This part of the urge is always present in psychopaths, and it was accurately recognized in earlier times.

Quora's programming language section has some discussions about COBOL that illustrate the distinction beautifully. When I hit Quora just now to find examples, the very first item turned out to be a perfect Self-Explanatory Sentence.....

Question:

Are there any old programming languages that are still in use?

Answer:

FORTRAN (63 years), COBOL (60 years), BASIC (56 years), C (48 years), SQL (42 years), C++ (35 years), Objective-C (32 years), Python (29 years), and Java (25 years) are all fairly old and still used (though COBOL is pretty specialized legacy code today). The first three are older than I am.

COBOL is specialized legacy code / Older than I am.

Self-explanatory sentence.

This is the Github view. Old shit is specialized legacy shit and you shouldn't be using it, and we will PROHIBIT YOU FROM USING IT. Any attempt to use tools or thinking from the filthy Neanderthal knuckle-dragging previous femtosecond will halt your life and crash your computer.

In the Github world, the PURPOSE of programming is to spend 100% of your mental time relearning, and 100% of your computer's CPU time processing updates. Windows 10 implements this purpose perfectly.

What is the original intended purpose of a TOOL like computers? The real purpose of any TOOL is to help you GET WORK DONE.

Fortunately the GET WORK DONE side is also well represented in Quora, by older WORKERS and even some younger WORKERS in places like Brazil.

Reality: In the world of computers that DO WORK, most of the WORK is done by COBOL. The part of the computing world that is truly needed, the part that would completely collapse the whole economy if it failed, is COBOL.

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Extension: Focus on WE WILL PROHIBIT YOU FROM USING IT.

I ran into an especially annoying example in the graphics world this month. Since 2000 I've been using Poser for work (courseware animation) and play. I've bought most of the updates, skipping a couple that were specialized sidetracks. Last year's update (v11) added a Github "feature" for the first time. Poser contacts the central server to check for valid license every time you use it. This was annoying in a practical way along with the IMMORALITY of stealing the tool. When my Comcast web service is down, which happens once a week or so, I can't use Poser.

With v12, released this month, they added a total deal breaker. Poser switched to using the latest version of Python, and LOCKED OUT all python programs using the TkInter GUI instead of the WXPython GUI. This may seem like a minor detail, but I've written about a thousand animation 'tools' using TkInter, and rewriting is NOT trivial. It takes about a day to rewrite from Tk to WX.

At first I went ahead and paid the $129.95 for the update, figuring they would HAVE to change this lockout. Nope, they don't HAVE to change it, because they're fully infected by the Github worm. They are revising the scripts that come with the Poser package, but anything that isn't in-house is out of luck.

After this became clear, I demanded a refund. They gave the refund and turned off the license for v12, which is appropriate. But they ALSO turned off the license for v11, which was using the same serial number.

That's outright theft. Now I can't use the last semi-usable version. So I'm severing the connection with Bondware, rolling back to v9, which was the last non-Githubed version.

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This shouldn't be an especially emotional process. I've been following this curve with software for 30 years, even before the Github crimes. Every program and OS reaches an optimal point when it has all the necessary features. After the optimum, newer versions add unnecessary shit and start subtracting the good stuff. Now Poser joins the crowd of STOP WHERE IT AIN'T BROKE, like COBOL.

There's an added emotional factor, along with the general exhaustion of surviving amid the worldwide takeover by psychopathic demons.

Most of the Python stuff that Bondware is taking in-house was originally derived from my scripts, which I had actively provided to the community from 2003 to 2010 or so. This was only mildly annoying before; I considered it as a form of teaching. The students took my examples and expanded them.

Now Bondware is forcing the teacher to spend all of his time revising his own tools instead of working. Well, this is where I get off the idiot train. This is where I stop subsidizing CRIME.

Labels: defensible times, Experiential education

  ¶ 11:01 PM