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Comment by Zenst | Hacker News Reader

I can tick the 10+ years COBOL box nicely, though that was 30+ years ago and with that, somebody with 1-3 years COBOL would be more effective than somebody as myself.

Still, in an era of movie superheroes, who knew that having 10+ years upon your CV would enable you to go, step aside good citizens, for I shall save you. COBOL man to the rescue.

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Or Cobol Woman! ;) Cobol was created by Admiral Grace Hopper.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/cobol-forever-1a49f7d28a39

I am pretty sure that individual was referring to themselves with that term.

I was indeed, but still a very valid point and after all without Grace - there would be no COBOL.

I am pretty sure my intent was not to misgender him (else I wouldn't have said "Or"), but to point out that women can be Super Cobol Programmers too, and in fact the first Super Cobol Programmer was a woman.

If you're touchy about people gently correcting accidental unintended sexism, take a moment to think about how women like Grace Hopper and Ada Lovelace have felt about being on the receiving end of systematic intentional sexism all their lives.

https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace

>If you're touchy about people gently correcting accidental unintended sexism

The point was that there is no sexism, unintended or otherwise, in the post you are "correcting". Projecting your touchiness onto others isn't very polite or constructive.

You are correct but the poster does raise fair and yes, nothing intended directly nor indirectly - however it would be possible to read that into it and the reply initially was fair and did restore balance for those that may mis-read and all done in the best possible taste - they used a geek-wink ";)".

However, it is easy to view such balance as over-balance and it can then snowball into something of which it was not, and words, like code - heck nobody writes perfect code first time, let alone wording. So you can easily get bugs, be that in the code or in how things are worded that open those words up to tangents or ambiguity that was never the intention.

Anyhow - we are all on the same page of that issue I do feel and with that, let's poor one out for Grace, who without her we would not even be having this conversation that COBOL has given us today.

I just vouched this after it just got flagged and as it is in response to myself that sent this path in motion and already been covered in this thread and no offence was meant or intended by myself of Don Hopkins, can we please read thru it all is cool.

We are all human after all and words are like code - bugs happen and we all operate our own unique brain-CPU's so things can and do run differently. No lines need to be read between here. Be well all and sorry, just thought I should clarify in the name of fairness for all and Don did nothing wrong in my eye's and it's all good.

>but to point out that women can be Super Cobol Programmers too, and in fact the first Super Cobol Programmer was a woman.

Well said and an extremly valid point upon many levels, let us not forget Grace.

I perhaps should of phrased it as COBOL Human, though that may of confused others more than not, more so with the mixed superheroes conversation and that in itself had legacy baggage as do many things that are easily tripped up upon.

I'd upvote you more as detail is as always important and should never be overlooked.

Unnecessary

Yes, but from my perspective - not unwelcome and I actually support the comment and took no misalignment or judgment from it - I'm all about balance and fairness - not that everytime the word man or women is used we have to then add lots of small print disclaimers. But it does remind us how some can read into things and reminds us to be more mindful of that aspect.

COBOL human to the rescue would of been better perhaps, so again unnecessary, yet not unwelcome and with that - everyone gets some karma.

Everytime I see COBOL, I always think of Newman from Jurassic Park and imagine that is a stereotypical COBOL programmer haha!

If you see any bosses with a weird scarf, back away cause they may spit corona-acid in your face!

Newman is some sort of Pascal programmer https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/28030/source-code...

That film's horrible misrepresentation of UNIX almost ruined it for me.

How exactly? Versus something like CSI, Jurassic Park got a lot of things right. The computers used were real SGI SPARCStations and they had a bunch of Thinking Machines CM-5s for gene sequencing in the background shots. I believe all of the on-screen shots were done with real Irix software (including the scene where they locked the doors, which was done using a real IRIX file manager called "fsn").

Sure it was given the Hollywood treatment, but it'd be pretty boring if they didn't.

Sun made SPARCstations, not SGI, who used MIPS, not SPARC, and just called them workstations. Then there was the SGI Indy, which was an SGI Indigo without the go. ;)

The 3d desktop file system navigator software running on the SGI workstation was actually a thing that SGI shipped, by Joel Sherrill <joel@sgi.com>, called SGI Fusion, or FSN!

Original URL of binary distribution:

ftp://ftp.sgi.com/sgi/fsn/fsn.tar.Z

Now archived at:

ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/unix/sgi/bin/fsn.tar.Z

https://github.com/jdm7dv/3d-file-system-navigator/blob/mast...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn_(file_manager)

>File System Navigator (fsn; pronounced "fusion") is an experimental application to view a file system in 3D, made by SGI for IRIX systems.

>Even though it was never developed to a fully functional file manager, it gained some fame after appearing in the movie Jurassic Park in 1993. In a scene in the film, the character Lex Murphy, played by Ariana Richards, finds a computer displaying the interface. She exclaims "It's a UNIX system! I know this!" and proceeds to restart the building's access control system, locking the control room's doors. After the release of the film, some perceived the visualization as an example of media misrepresentation of computers, citing the computer game-like display as being an unrealistic Hollywood mockup.

FSN – the IRIX 3D file system tool from Jurassic Park

http://www.siliconbunny.com/fsn-the-irix-3d-file-system-tool...

SGI Fusion - FSN 3d File System Navigator

SGI File System Navigator, otherwise known as Fusion. Running on IRIX 6.5 on an Octane. If you have an SGI, a binary of this program is available at ftp.sgi.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaRHU1XxMJQ

It's a unix system

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxIPcbmo1_U

"Indigo without the go." -Mark Hughes (?)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEcw_oTKTa0?t=6m8s

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7341455

Software Usability II

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/tirix/embarrassi...

My vivid memory is of that excruciatingly slow zoom into a bar graph representation of a directory, to which the girl exclaims, "this is UNIX! I know UNIX!". A real world UNIXer would go straight to a shell prompt, especially in a time crunch with Cretaceous predators at the door.

You have to go to the original Crichton novel for the real cringeworthy misrepresentation of tech: the "code" listings will make you weep. He's a great writer, don't get me wrong, but would a little bit of research and/or editorial assistance have hurt ?!

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