Are computer programmers smarter than everyone else?

[danacara]

Charlie, Bob, this may be beyond the scope of belief, but until 2001, we actually registered for classes using those punchcards. They looked exactly like that. They came with a four-page manual and you had to go to the registrar to actually punch and run through the mainframe. One error and you'd have to start again. Sometimes they simply wouldn't read, and you'd get to class, and you'd be registered multiple times. Hmm. We thought it was ghetto styling in the biggest way ever. The Princeton University Registrar, at the forefront of information technology.

 

[caitycaity]

Originally posted by danacara
Charlie, Bob, this may be beyond the scope of belief, but until 2001, we actually registered for classes using those punchcards. They looked exactly like that. They came with a four-page manual and you had to go to the registrar to actually punch and run through the mainframe. One error and you'd have to start again. Sometimes they simply wouldn't read, and you'd get to class, and you'd be registered multiple times. Hmm. We thought it was ghetto styling in the biggest way ever. The Princeton University Registrar, at the forefront of information technology.

wow, and i thought phone registration was old school!

 

[charlie,nj]

Bob the judges decided to let you have that one…but please remember to answer in the form of a question next time.

The correct answer: “what is an old punch card”.

Dana – wow that is something..I went to a college in Jersey City…it was one of the first to have a computer science program. I think one of the CS projects was to automat the schools registration process…this was back in the 70’s.

(I typed "punch card" in Alta Vista search and the Princeton punch card came up..small world)

 

[danacara]

Originally posted by charlie,nj

(I typed "punch card" in Alta Vista search and the Princeton punch card came up..small world)

Ya it was probably the last punch card in operation in the United States! Ha!

 

[Bob Slydell]

Originally posted by charlie,nj
Bob the judges decided to let you have that one…but please remember to answer in the form of a question next time.

The correct answer: “what is an old punch card”.

WooHoo!!!

I'll take PASCAL for 400, Alex.

 

[Towncrier]

Does anyone know why the hollerith (punch) card is the size that it is?

One summer while I was in college, I keypunched the titles of every song on every album that I owned along with those of my roommate. I managed to keypunch 10,000 cards that summer. My first programming job after college was at a company where we had to enter our programs on coding forms and hand them to a keypunch operator. The problem was that I could key my programs in faster than our keypunch operator could. I was so glad when we switched over to online terminals and did away with those 026 and 029 keypunch machines.

I've been programming computers since 1970. And I don't feel any smarter.

 

[charlie,nj]

What is…….

A punched card from the 1890 census Note that one corner is cut diagonally to protect against upside down and/or backwards cards that might not otherwise be detected The card measures 3.25 by 7.375 inches, the same size as the 1887 US paper currency because Hollerith used Treasury Department containers as card boxes (pictures not actual size, but all to the same scale):

(Ok so I didn’t know 5 minutes ago ..but thanks to the computer I did a search and found the answer.)(I hope the judges don't mind)

TC – 10,000 cards.. wow.. did they go through on the first try?

 

[WDWHound]

Ahh, Punchcards. They survived just long enough to make the second year of my CS major more interesting than it needed to be. I have 2 distinct punchcard memories from those heady days of the early 80’s. The first is when I dropped a 1200 card deck (un-numbered of course), which contained the assembler and linking loader I had to write for my first assembly course. This resulted in much weeping and gnashing of teeth on my part as I spent the rest of the evening getting the deck back in order.

The second memory is that of several lost days trying to figure out why my Pascal program deck would submit, compile and run with zero errors, and yet the job it created used 0 CPU cycles at run time and produced no output. Turns out that one extra card had been inserted near the start of my deck as a practical joke by a friend. The card contained two characters - ”(*”. For those who have never known the joys of Pascal, those 2 characters signal the start of a comment block. There was no matching close comment “*)” in the deck, but our firendly neighborhood Pascal compiler figured it would be helpful and add the 2 missing characters to the end of my code at compile time just to make things tidy. The result – My entire program compiled as a comment. The listings I got back after submitting my deck looked fine, no sign of anything wrong, which made this little comment trick nearly impossible to find

I had a few choice comments for my friend as well when I found out what he had done,

 

[WeirdEyes]

I work with a lot of computer programmers and to answer your question....no! Sorry, but programmers might be good a developing software, etc., some have NO common sense.

 

[Towncrier]

TC – 10,000 cards.. wow.. did they go through on the first try?

Those cards survived several trips through the card reader. Seems that there wasn't enough disk space or memory on the Unix system that I was using in the early 70's to hold that much information, so I had to read them in each time I wanted to print the list. The more difficult task was sorting the 10,000 cards. I used a card sorter which required three passes to sort on a single column. So in order to sort, for instance, on the first 10 characters of the artist's name, I had to run the 10,000 cards through the sorter a total of 30 times. Needless to say, I didn't sort (or print) the list very often.

I still had the boxes of cards until about 10 years ago when I decided to recycle them. I knew that I would never use the data contained on them again.

 

[Bob Slydell]

Originally posted by WeirdEyes
I work with a lot of computer programmers and to answer your question....no! Sorry, but programmers might be good a developing software, etc., some have NO common sense.

Yes, but common sense and intelligence have little to nothing in common. I would argue that they are completely opposite traits -- the smarter one is the less common sense they tend to have.

 

[charlie,nj]

You know what they say:

“those who can’t program…manage!”

 

[WhenUwishUponAstar]

Originally posted by WDWHound
There are only 10 kinds of people in the world - Those that understand binary and those that don't.

I laugh at that joke everytime.....errrr to answer the OP's q

Programmer produces code he believes is bug-free.
Product is tested. 20 bugs are found.
Programmer fixes 10 of the bugs and explains to the testing department that the other 10 aren't really bugs.
Testing department finds that five of the fixes didn't work and discovers 15 new bugs.
Repeat three times steps 3 and 4.
Due to marketing pressure and an extremely premature product announcement based on overly-optimistic programming schedule, the product is released.
Users find 137 new bugs.
Original programmer, having cashed his royalty check, is nowhere to be found.
Newly-assembled programming team fixes almost all of the 137 bugs, but introduce 456 new ones.
Original programmer sends underpaid testing department a postcard from Fiji. Entire testing department quits.
Company is bought in a hostile takeover by competitor using profits from their latest release, which had 783 bugs.
New CEO is brought in by board of directors. He hires a programmer to redo program from scratch.
Programmer produces code he believes is bug-free...

yes!

 

[charlie,nj]

bump!

 

[charlie,nj]

Funny I programmed this thread to bump itself up on November 9th 12:30pm (et) and it just beeped me to let me know.

It worked….hey we are smart!

 

[Dan Murphy]

.

 

[Missy1961]

Maybe they are, but I just had a conversation with my friend the programmer and he almost forgot his wife's birthday.

 

[mtblujeans]

I think so....but I think anyone who can do anything I can't is SMART! It's a special left-brain, right-brain thing with Programmers, isn't it??

 

[goudaman40]

according to my hubby I am smart . . . I just like to over analysis everything and give the technical answer instead to the overwhelming answer of

YES!



(Sometimes we have to make life difficult since we sleep, eat, and work in code)!

 

[KathyTX]

Originally posted by Bob Slydell
Yes, but common sense and intelligence have little to nothing in common. I would argue that they are completely opposite traits -- the smarter one is the less common sense they tend to have.

I agree- there seems to be absolutely no correlation between logic and common sense.