The Rime of the Ancyent Programmer
There was an ancyent programmer, a hacker proud was he, and though well past his prime, he knew a thing or two, or three. His hair was in a ponytail, My life has been a long strange trip, I started out, now long ago, Those were such very diff ’rent times. The 80-column card was king, |
Assembler programs I did write, and complex FORTRAN IV, but COBOL I refused to learn, being told it was a bore. Then came the days of minis, Oh! The toggle switches I did use, Boot loader ROMs from diodes made, So eight-inch floppies, paper tapes, Around that time it was I played |
I managed then to land a job with a small research team in a lab doing aerospace work. It seemed almost a dream. My main box for the next few years But soon the minis were passé Sixty-eight-hundred, Z-eighty, Embedded systems I’d create, With wire-wrap sockets and “perf ” boards, But then, my boss, a clever man |
At first, of course, the skeptics scoffed, (not being “in the loop”), but soon the U.S. Air Force came and funded our small group. They bought me a brand-new machine, The year was 1988, For I was then expected to vi and C shell, Bourne shell, cron, So tar and tail, cpio, And if all that weren’t quite enough |
So TCP and UDP and more I undertook to learn (to write client-server apps) from Stevens’s exc’llent book. Those first few years I worked in C, I began writing small shell scripts Then one day while on Usenet, I The language, it was Perl, of course, I used Perl on my SGI, And so it was, for a few years, |
That new idea came from CERN, the child of Berners-Lee, I downloaded Mosaic then and httpd. I played with them and thought “ho hum.” |
About that time I decided to try Linux “for real.” I had a heavy-duty task I thought would be ideal. We wanted to do CFD, And Linux did the job quite well; The next few years brought “browser wars,” I played around with Java some, So I continue to use Perl You may have noticed that I just |
I’ve seen many things come and go: languages, tools, and styles, technologies and companies. Some bring tears, others smiles. It seems the pace is quickening, So much to learn. So much to know. And now the ancyent programmer His goal of helping others cope, I know the old programmer well; |
[From CACM, May 2007, written by Stephen B. Jenkens]
Hmmm, I seem to resemble this…