C++, eh?

When I first studied C (not ++, and pre-ANSI days), I got a book
from a Walden bookstore on the far west side of town -- and I live
in northeast Phoenix -- because it was the only bookstore in town
I could find *any* book on C -- and it was not K&R -- in its
collection of 20 or so computer related titles on the store
shelves.

I "learned" C in the evenings sitting at my desk with a ruler and
pen to underline with (they didn't have transparent markers yet),
making marginal notes.

I did not have a compiler. In fact, I did not yet have a computer.
(I bought a Commodore 64 not long afterward.)

It was not until I worked for Motorola (actually Four Phase Systems,
which was owned by Motorola) in 1982 that I had a chance even to
write a Hello World C program.

By that time I had written a bunch of stuff in BASIC, including the
porting of a commercial application program for the IBM PC to the
TRS-80 (who remembers those?), and had even managed to write and
compile at least one COBOL program, which also ran on the TRS-80.
(Not my machine.)

C++ has been around a long time, but was rarely even mentioned when
I worked at Motorola, other than to argue its merits. (Most people
of experience believed it produced bloated code inappropriate to
the system programming we did there.)

Years later, when I worked a short time at MontaVista, in an office
full of Linux kernel developers I don't believe I ever heard the
words "object oriented" uttered, except on a couple of occasions:

(1) Object oriented Perl: YUK!!! That ended that discussion forthrightly.

(2) Various comments by people who knew and loved Python, which
    included most of the people who worked in the test organization
    I was a part of.

Reminisce onward ...

> on my first class in C++. I remember the funny "They drop my punch cards
> stories". Good times :)

-- 
Lynn
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