Well met,
I’m Brian Tiffin. COBOL nerd, programming language junkie. Old guy, started in on my 6th decade in the summer of 2023, a few months after a triple bypass open heart surgery. Out of the blue that one. Canadian health care, so the only real stresses are physical, and that is going, and has gone, swimmingly well, given the circumstances. 🙂
Nickname is Bluey, or Blue.
This will be a technical blog usually focused on some aspect of computer programming for the joy of it, written for the joy of it.
COBOL
Highlights will include COBOL as GnuCOBOL. I’m one of the two GNU co-maintainers for the GnuCOBOL compiler suite. All the actual work is done by Simon Sobisch and contributors, and I brag about it online and in books.
https://gnucobol.sourceforge.io/faq/index.html
The project mascot is a work horse, Grace.
Hercules, VM/370 and tricked out MVS 3.8
Other topics might include Hercules, an s/390 mainframe emulator. Hercules now runs versions of VM/370 for virtualization and MVS 3.8 from the 1980s. That MVS 3.8 has been tricked out over the years, by some absolute master class programmers, and is now in turnkey 3, 4 and 5 easy install packages.
https://www.prince-webdesign.nl/tk5
Computer programming
Programming languages are my hobby. I’ve studied dozens and dozens.
- BASIC
- Z80 Assembler
- Pascal
- COBOL
- Fortran
- Forth
- C
- Icon
were the first few. The list continues to grow with
- C++
- C#
- D
- Elixir
- Factor
- Groovy
- Haxe
- Intercal
- Java
- Kotlin
- Lisp
- MUMPS
- Neko
- Oberon
- Python
- Q
- REBOL
- SNOBOL
- TCL
- Unicon
- V
- WebAssembly
- XPL
added over the decades.
There are a lot more, and for the last two letters, I’ll leave that as an exercise for the imagination (your’s that is, I know a couple of languages in the Y Z camps too, but that might start to sound like bragging).
Microcontrollers
Maybe some mention of Raspberry Pi RP2040 Pico, Pico W and other microcontrollers, with their own assemblers, toolchains, and so much techy goodness as to be Living In The future, LITf, lit. The f is silent, and invisible, in the future. 2024 be lit.
Pico W, wireless web serving, networking and/or hosting access point hotspots. In the 8 dollar range, plus the cost of something to deliver 5 volts of electricity, like USB connection or battery pack. Arm assembly, Python and C programming kits, along with Forth, Hopper, BASIC and a nice selection of other programming languages for code burned into flash.
Farewell
For now.
Oh, and jokes.
Happy new year, everyone. It was 2023. What was “was” initially?
Before was was was was was is.
