WasPentalive

The mad rush to sell the sizzle, not the steak.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have one company create a simple printer that just prints. It does not have a local webpage. It does not monitor your ink supplies. It does not phone home. It uses ink from bottles sold inexpensivly.

If they overlap, aren’t you in danger of having your company try to take over your passion project?

I write programs for myself. I have learned enough C, Pascal, Fortran, Basic to write small things and even larger things like a visual file manager for MSDOS, or my own version of the venerable STAR TREK game. I even know of big O notation (But I don’t know how to calculate it for a given algorithm)

But I never wanted to be a programmer - having to work on other people’s programs 8 hours a day. That would ruin programming as a hobby. When I am self-directed it is fun.

I was a Data Center tech instead. Minding 3 football fields of other people’s computers.

You don’t really change the compiler itself. You can build up libraries of your own subroutines and link in the ones you need in any particular program, just like you might in C.

This is why I never became a programmer. I am retired now, but for the last 10 years, I have been a data center support agent. Programming is fun, I would hate to ruin that fun by having to work to someone else’s rule.

I am interested in all things random or mathematical. I have written programs to simulate the decay of radioactive ‘stuff’, a program that simulates the CA Lottery by flipping a coin (someone said that your chances are about the same as flipping a coin 25 times in a row in a run of either heads or tails).

On the mathematical side, I have written a program to run the 3n+1 (Colatz) series and record process features, like counting evens and odds, the number of steps, and the maximum value found in the series. Perhaps the average of the values in the series would be interesting to calculate…

Combining mathematics with randomness - I have worked on the 100 prisoners idea, How many loops are created in this run, and how long is the longest one? If any loop contains more than 50 members then the prisoners lose and don’t get to go home.

I have ideas for a traditional basic interpreter only lines are labeled not numbered.

I have a traditional Star Trek program that I have written many times improving slightly each time.

And when it is powerful enough you can make it self hosting.