I am still an active software developer! I love doing it and I can’t imagine a world or a job where I don’t have the freedom to practice that.  Of course, because of the nature of my job, I have to do it after hours and weekends etc, which I don’t mind because I just love doing it. The title of this blog is related to that and not anything wider than that. There have been so many cautionary articles written on how one should not trust everything on the web and I am not going there. I just want to talk about finding answers on the web as a developer.

I just marvel at how far we have come in the last 30 or so years. In my first job at Wesleyan University, I had to learn assembly language programming for the VAX/VMS system. I had a lot of experience  in higher level languages such as Fortran, PL/I. My PhD thesis was on computationally heavy systems that required a lot of distance calculations between atoms. Our group decided to speed that step up by coding that part in Assembly Language, but that was for an IBM 370. I also taught courses at Hunter College on this subject, so I was familiar with the concepts, but VAX/VMS is a very different system.

And in those days, if you get stuck, it was not easy to get answers! There were a LOT of bound manuals that you could look through, but it took forever to find the right answers. You can also call support, but they were of little help. In order for them to understand and help, they needed to spend a lot of time to look through your code etc. and they just couldn’t afford the time. In several instances, we would just give up and start over in a different direction.

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