Back from the store

Ellen Ullman takes an unvarnished look at her ups and downs as a "woman programmer:"

...the prejudice will follow you. What will save you is tacking into the love of the work, into the desire that brought you there in the first place. This creates a suspension of time, opens a spacious room of your own in which you can walk around and consider your response.

I was hooked by her lede, which uses a musical simile to describe the sort of work I've done for most of my working life:

I was an ordinary computer programmer. I wrote code that ran at the levels between flashy human interfaces and the deep cores of operating systems, like the role of altos in a chorus, who provide the structure without your taking much notice of their melodic lines.

Tamara Shopsin provides a clever illustration, too.

Blink and you miss it

Vijith Assar tells the story of one of the web's most reviled tags.

ᔥ The Morning News

Sister act

The new look for AARP Health, a sister site to one we launched earlier this year, is on the air. With a sweet mobile microsite as a kicker!

Blazer

Laura Sydell profiles Sarah Allen, founder of Blazing Cloud and co-founder of the RailsBridge workshops, "born out of a desire to improve the gender ratio in the San Francisco Rails community, and ... expanded to try to improve the diversity in open source and in tech companies, too."

BA-what?

Some of the most interesting questions that I try to answer on Stack Overflow are "dusty deck" problems.

"I inherited this program to maintain/emulate/port and I don't understand it. Heck, I'm not even sure what language it's written in!"

Usually, the questioner's first guess is COBOL. (It's old and incomprehensible, so it must be COBOL, amirite?) Such was the surmise of user1381537, who offered this source file. Other posters and I quickly disabused him of the notion that it was written in COBOL; Gilbert Le Blanc figures that it's Caché MultiValue Basic.

I amused myself by pointing out some of the less obvious aspects of the program, and by flipping through the documentation to understand some of the peculiarities of this BASIC dialect. In a 1970s-vintage program, just finding the main processing loop can be a challenge. GOSUBs are a feature that is, Fox be thanked, no longer maintstream. I like the compactness of the bracket syntax for performing substring operations. And I envy user1381537's innocence that he/she has never encountered a zero-suppression format string that looks like "ZZ,ZZ9".