You young developers don't know you're born

[sasguru]

Starting playing with Python 3.
Fook me, everything's done for you with powerful libraries.
No wonder Bob Shawadiwadi can claim to do programming.
Back in my day etc. etc.

Seriously though, these modern languages are good fun.
What happened to pointers and the like?

[suityou01]

Starting playing with Python 3.
Fook me, everything's done for you with powerful libraries.
No wonder Bob Shawadiwadi can claim to do programming.
Back in my day etc. etc.

Seriously though, these modern languages are good fun.
What happened to pointers and the like?

ByRef and ByValue is all you got these days. .Net has support for "unmanaged code" so you can do pointers there, otherwise you would have to write in C/C++ if you want pointers.

The yoofs of today are far too busy worring about which generic to use for most elegant code snobbery. Garbage collection, now don't get me started

[xoggoth]

I am always amazed by little programming has changed. It shouldn't be needed at all, we should have graphical designers where you just shove icons of things here and there, connect them, click a button and it's mostly done for you.

I used to work in control system simulation and that went that way back in the early 90s. You set up a plant diagram and typed values in basically. Many of the principals used could equally be applied to databases or any other application. Access does it in a small way but there is no reason why real db systems shouldn't in a far bigger way.

[d000hg]

Pointers? You're looking at Python and asking what happened to pointers? They've been dead at least a decade in traditional languages, much bigger things are different than that in modern languages like Python.

And yes, it's kind of fun. You get to spend much more time writing code to do something, rather than code to support the code that does something.

[sasguru]

Pointers? You're looking at Python and asking what happened to pointers? They've been dead at least a decade in traditional languages, much bigger things are different than that in modern languages like Python.

And yes, it's kind of fun. You get to spend much more time writing code to do something, rather than code to support the code that does something.

Well last time I did some programming in a "modern" language was Java in 2002.
SAS on the other hand - still going strong and the base language has virtually been unchanged since 1976.

[suityou01]

I am always amazed by little programming has changed. It shouldn't be needed at all, we should have graphical designers where you just shove icons of things here and there, connect them, click a button and it's mostly done for you.
I used to work in control system simulation and that went that way back in the early 90s. You set up a plant diagram and typed values in basically. Many of the principals used could equally be applied to databases or any other application. Access does it in a small way but there is no reason why real db systems shouldn't in a far bigger way.

That's visual studio innit?

[bogeyman]

Well last time I did some programming in a "modern" language was Java in 2002.
SAS on the other hand - still going strong and the base language has virtually been unchanged since 1976.

Yeah, but you wouldn't want to write an ecommerce system with it!

[bogeyman]

That's visual studio innit?

Blimey. Your VS must be a hell of a lot more visual than mine.

[sasguru]

Yeah, but you wouldn't want to write an ecommerce system with it!

Why ever not? I would certainly consider SAS for the back end for a system like that - tried and trusted with mega volumes of data, robust SQL capabilities, reporting and analysis tools second to none.

And I believe it has some web front-end tools written in some new-fangled language called Java.

[bogeyman]

Why ever not? I would certainly consider SAS for the back end for a system like that - tried and trusted with mega volumes of data, robust SQL capabilities, reporting and analysis tools second to none.

And I believe it has some web front-end tools written in some new-fangled language called Java.

Well I must admit to not seeing SAS for a couple of decades.

In fact my only real experience of it is installing it and playing around making it do the 'cowboy hat' plot etc.

Perhaps it's come on in leaps and bounds.