Maybe the reason there aren't as many of us greybeards is that many of us passed through high school and college without ever having the chance to take a programming course.
Now there's another potentially interesting poll topic - how many people here have had formal programming training?

In (civil) engineering school we had none, but there was an amusing pass/fail course in 2nd year in which each week you had 3 hours to write a program (on an Apple II) to implement some trivial calculation (e.g. plotting the bending moment diagram for a bridge as a truck passes over it). While I'd been fiddling with computers for years by then, the majority found it very difficult, and I still fail to see what it was to achieve apart from making neophytes into computerphobes.

I also recall a course in first year that had us doing a bit of Fortran IV on a PDP-11 via VC-404s, and from my observation it was just a way to justify new terminals as my classmates pretty well destroyed those 404s out of rage over the term.

(my hair is greying but my moustache ain't - go figure)

(ob. Cadfael comment: now replaying on CBC at midnight IIRC, great fun!)

In reply to RE: RE: RE: My age is by Albannach
in thread My age is by vroom

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.