Good bye PHP 4...It's been fun

[jason]

The PHP team released the last PHP 4 update (ever) yesterday and today PHP 4 officially becomes unsupported software. So long PHP 4, It's been a great nine years.

[JPC-Greg]

wow, what a run. Doesnt compare to perl though, its been at 5.6.1 for what , like a billion years now?

[jason]

For real...I started my web scripting "career" using Perl 5 then switched briefly to ASP 2 and then moved on to PHP 3 as my primary language. Since then I've gone through three PHP versions and Perl pretty much stands where it was when I started. It's like comparing apples to oranges, though. While they have their similarities both languages are quite different beasts and for various reasons Perl just doesn't need to evolve quite as fast.

--Jason

[Ron]

Anyone else here ever code in FORTRAN, COBOL, assembler, C or IBM JCL?

[Vin DSL]

Gotta say...

I'm somewhat shocked by this recent revelation!

I'm supposed to be the old fuddy duddy, yet I converted PHP-Nuke to PHP 5 months ago...

Will little wonders never cease?!?!?!?

Thinking about it, I *guess* it was that kraut that was into PHP 5...

[mattsiegman]

wow, what a run. Doesnt compare to perl though, its been at 5.6.1 for what , like a billion years now?

Perl 5.8 came out over 8 years ago.
Perl 5.10 came out a couple months ago.

It's not THAT dead...

Anyone else here ever code in FORTRAN, COBOL, assembler, C or IBM JCL?

Does C++ count?

[Ron]

Does C++ count?

Not reeeeally. Definitely no if you actually use classes in place of funcs.

How about this instead:
Anyone here ever draw a REAL flow chart?
Anyone here ever draw a REAL structure chart?
Anyone ever use a flow charting stencil?
How about a 132-column steel output ruler (and use it to code a report from a mock-up)?
Anyone ever send printouts to a "high speed" band printer?
Anyone taken any courses on Software Development Life Cycle?
Anyone work on a system or a project with 100's of programmers?
Anyone here actually ever need to be (majorly) concerned with memory and or disk utilization?
Anyone here need to actually allocate disk cylinders ?

[shwn]

anyone else here ever code in fortran, cobol, assembler, c or ibm jcl? :d

COBOL, BAL, ... flow charts. yep. Back in the old days when computers were about as big as a house, and large carts full of punched cards were rolled in, ...

Oh oh! Guess I have revealed way too much about my age!

[jason]

I've used C (without the ++), but I doubt I'd remember too much of it these days. Its been a while.

As for the other stuff...I have had to draw real flowcharts (I still draw flowcharts, but not to the same standards these days), I've still got the stencil around somewhere, too; I've got one of those rulers in my desk and I use it regularly (as a back scratcher); I remember the band printers from going in to work with my mom when I was little, but I've never used one myself; I have taken courses in software development lifecycles, and I remember using punch cards for notepaper back in the day--I probably still have a buch in a box somewhere, too, but I never had to use them to run a program.

I just read something last week about some company creating a COBOL compiler in Java...

--Jason

[homoludens]

I had to write a bunch of stuff in C for my masters. Double plus ungood. In fact, it pretty much put me off programming for the next ten years.

[Gwaihir]

COBOL skills can make you a lot of money these days. So much in fact that they're offering COBOL classes in college again. There are quite a number of important legacy systems still running on COBOL that need maintenance. Could be a local Dutch thing of course..

I have one of those flowchart rulers and still scribble with it occasionally.

I remember an AutoLISP exercise from university, which was terribly hard to get done within the amount of memory available for LISP programs in AutoCAD 10. It was about programming in a structured way, which is kind of at odds with extreme line count optimization, so we ended up specifying "just run it in AutoCAD 12 instead".

Is a high speed band printer one of those matrix printers with so many needles that it prints an entire line at once?

[Ron]

Nope, but close. It actually has a steel band that whizzes around in front of 132 hammers and has multiple copies of the character set in raised relief; it (sort-of) prints a line at a time. (Line printing is where the unix command lp comes from. )

I wrote a proof-of-concept program in C for production use that fully cached database relations, including building of multiple in-memory indices. I then passed it off to one of my UNIX Gurus with instructions to "genericize to allow use for any table if possible" and he (in 3 days!) returned code that sort of looked like mine, I could tell my code was in there, but the level of pointers to pointers to pointers was so mind-boggling... It is a long story with many facets, but it was part of one of those professional "big wins" in your career that you remember forever.