

The Programmer and the Elves: a Fairy Tale - edw519
http://pigsandfishes.com/filks/mikefilk/progelves.html

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hugh
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.

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thaumaturgy
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. :-)

~~~
trevelyan
I'm right there myself. Good luck. :)

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Eliezer
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.

~~~
PieSquared
Out of curiosity, what was this impossible thing?

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

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youngnh
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

