The Programmer and the Elves: a Fairy Tale

Now that was just silly. No Fortran elf is going to have variables with legible names "Shamrock" and "Rainbow" and "Misty_Morning_Dew".

Try shmrc, rnbo, and mmd, and make sure that mmd is an integer.

I'm turning 30 this year (eek). My first "computer job" was as operator/programmer for a school district in the East Bay, while I was still in high school.

While I was there, over the course of a few nights I wrote, in COBOL, a program that would read in the digital punch cards on their mainframe and a set of variables passed to it, interpret some codes in the data for the embedded variables, and then spit out a temporary static digital punch card for the next job being run.

It was challenging because COBOL doesn't understand strings; I ended up using some horrible hack involving the Unisys string/unstring system calls.

13 years later, I'm starting to build a business on doing impossible little things for companies. It's kinda fun. Stressful, but rewarding. :-)

Having done at least one thing that I thought was "impossible", I now expect myself to do the impossible ever after. I don't give up without trying, anyway.

Everyone should do something impossible at least once in their lifetimes.

I was expecting the elves to come back charging exurbanite consulting fees to maintain a system no one else could understand...

huh, I didn't think it would be a social lesson, I was expecting something more along the lines of: use compilers and high-level languages and don't care what your object code looks like