*IT ppl didn't like me when I had corporate work but the biz
analysts loved me. I'm an oddball: They put me as a "Systems
Analyst II" because I created this thing in Excel and VBA to
pull from the web, ibm mainframes, cd roms, email extracts,
performing business logic on it, interacting with whatever
databases they had, into several massive excel spreadsheets that
I made that, with the push of a button (I made a big silver
button: "CLICK HERE"] - that could pull that all in live, do the
data transforms and business metrics on it, spit out granular
data customized for 10s of thousands of districts with thousands
of sales reps, send them all file attachments, and not ONLY was
the production interactive, but the final spreadsheets they got
were interactive for them. Anyway, they needed me. This is like
15 years ago tho'. When I left in 2002, I had very little
documentation but I had to train a dozen people on it, which I
did. THEY got to document the processes and procedures, learn
how to customize for new drugs when they came in, learned my
coding style [seemed like spaghetti but they 'got it'] and off I
went. They used it 'til just a few years ago 'til they got eaten
up by Merck and I don't know what happened after that. Anyway, I
represent _exactly_ the kind of person that good programming
techniques has been trying to eliminate for 25+ years tongue
emoticon == I love taking advantage of APIs. I've also done with
in OOP as well, but just as a hobby. Actually, all of it I do as
a hobby tongue emoticon I'm a troublemaker, but I _try_ to use
social engineering whenever possible. A month ago, for a weekend
project, decided I wanted to upload 10,000 of my vines (6 second
video service) to the Internet Archive. Generating XML can be
done anywhere with anything, ,so with my workhorse, Excel, batch
files, text editors, whatever i had at hand, I grabbed all the
vines from the vine server that I could, transformed the
hashtags into subjects acceptable to internet archive's xml
format, stuck it all up on their ftp server and began
processing. Well, after getting my acct shut for excessive
activity (and some complaining on the forums about "all this
crap" being uploaded to the IA, I found the email address of the
dude who handles SEO and organization of the moving images part
of the IA, apologized, explained my grand plan for the weekend,
and my love of the mission of Internet Archive (which I do
believe in). Anyway, he reinstates my account, gives me my own
section of the library to do my work in. So yeah, ppl like me
who do stuff like this challenge the assumptions of systems
engineers... but I think it's a good thing. The challenges
forces the engineers to make the systems robust and scalable,
hidden assumptions on their part can be exposed and revised. ==
Interesting thing about closures, from my limited comprehension
of them ('cause I don't deal with this stuff right now), is that
it's not merely a data object and not merely a function but the
whole little environment in an easy to use bundle. It doesn't
get in the way as it's not global and yet you dont' have to use
wonky tricks to try to carry local variables into a global
environment because they're tucked neatly away in their own
little mini ecosystem, just waiting to be utilized if needed.
Anyway, my analogy is probably way off but it's how my brain
works tongue emoticon == Cool. Then I got the concept alright.
That's the first time I saw the phrase "lexically scoped name
binding" [I don't travel in your circles] but upon reading it,
it makes sense. I can read IT and comprehend it, I just don't
speak it tongue emoticon == About a year back, I decided to play
around with Erlang. It's old-school in so many ways but it used
to be used in some pretty big projects. It's a functional
language but moreso than that, I heart emoticon the robust
concurrency ability. Its fault tolerance is bar none... it just
passes messages, it's actor based so you can have as many actors
running as you like, and they never bump into each other. One of
your processes dies, everything else just keeps working. I don't
have a practical need for it at present, but it just "feels"
powerful. Sometimes I get on a 'language kick' and I go dive
into a computer language I don't know anything much about.
Erlang had been tickling my radar for a while but when I dove
in, I could see why the users are so passionate about it. == Ah
here we are: [1]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYmZExJ4nGI I
took a little slideshow a guy made for an Erlang conference,
introducing them to DRAKON, stole the slides, and made a little
video for youtube ['cause those 'slideshare' pages are annoying
and it needed some music]. It's actually what got me to look
into Drakon. There's not many tools available for Drakon; it's
more of a "nice idea" than something that's been productionized
outside of some special uses (apparently) in Russia... Anyway
yeah - so it's July 29, 2015. So, I guess 9 months ago I was
obsessed with Erlang. I had a similar thing with Haskell. I have
ancient ones too - APL, had a bunch of stuff for Fourth, and
some stuff that makes special use of the unique properties of
FPGA's. Systems - I just love understanding systems, at least at
a basic level. Russell Ackoff, who was right there at the start
of systems thinking back in the 50s/60s, and gave talks all
through the mid 1990s, was the master of this stuff. Lived and
breathed it for 40 years. If you can comprehend entire systems
and their functions "at once", you're never lost when you have
to work within the details because you see how the piece "fits"
in the greater picture. For example: What's a car? It's not an
engine. Engine doesn't make a car. It's not wheels. It's not
even the driver. It's the system. Gets you from a-b. A person
isn't a brain: a person is a system and is within a greater
system called society which influences the system of the person.
Stuff like that. Eh, I'm babbling tongue emoticon ==
References
Visible links
1.
https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DTYmZExJ4nGI&h=6AQFy49ta
