We’re closing in on college application deadlines. One of the albums that my mom kept included a recommendation letter for my own application to MIT in 1979. I was working at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center on the Pioneer Venus project (specifically, data analysis for information streamed back from the Orbiter). Goddard was a two-tiered plantation where the elites were federal government civil service employees and the slaves were employed by contractors. In my case, the contractor that actually sent me paychecks was Computer Sciences Corporation, though I worked on site at NASA every day. My boss was Naren Bewtra, who was born in India and came to the U.S. to earn a physics Ph.D. at Cornell.
Here’s the album page:
Related:
I read a book on Fortran in the late ’70s, and first got a chance to use it in 1984 at a summer college program for high school students, “Scientific Computing”. I worked for a sailboat store as a high school student, much more fun IMO and I met cuter girls. A lot of the “codes” [sic] for linear algebra in supercomputing applications are still in Fortran 90. My first language was Basic, which I used to write a fantasy baseball prototype in when I was 14 on one of the first IBM PCs. I didn’t even apply to MIT, much less Caltech–I was dorky enough. I wish you were still working with us on interactive and non-interactive graphics, especially in Lisp, your creative ideas are needed. I’m the “embarrassment” (formerly the non-PC “black-sheep) of our family, so my mom didn’t keep records of my National Merit semifinalist accomplishment.
I know nothing of coding (or as we used to call it, programming) since my Commodore 64, but what is the practical difference between Fortran and Cobol? Cobol was in the news here in New Jersey because it turns out that our unemployment-benefits system is programmed in Cobol so during one of the recent recessions they had to bring programmers out of retirement because the system couldn’t handle the volume.
If you or Phil (or anyone else) want to chime in and help this layman, it would be appreciated
Cobol is for helping you develop business applications. More than 20 billion lines still in use last time I checked, though that was at least a decade ago. This time, I hear the banks will use AI to translate into something more modern.
Fortran is for translating mathematical formulas into (hopefully) fast assembly language. Mainly used to run old nuclear codes and the like on supercomputers. For many years while I was in grad school, there were papers on automatically parallelizing ‘dusty decks’, which I took to be punchcards in various top secret archives. Possibly translated into computer files at some point.
Cobol is database transaction- oriented language and usually used in conjunction with database management system called DB2. Both run on IBM mainframes and cost millions in annual running fees. Cobol programmers rates used to be depressed because mainframes are expensive closed architecture and are not popular. Usually Cobol programmers can not work on other platforms due to odd and archaic Cobol language features.
Fortran is for efficient computations. It is primary used in engineering and computation – intensive applications. There is Visual Fortran that runs on regulat PCs. Most of Fortran code was replaced with C code and staff like Matlab or R, but it remains in use.
SN: Cobol, released in 1960, was developed by committee (though the only person affiliated with Cobol who gets any credit today is Grace Hopper). I’ve never used Cobol, but I think it has some significant shortcomings in the ability to create modular code. Cobol is also rather verbose because the designers wanted it to read like English. So a Cobol program beyond a modest size becomes unwieldy and difficult to maintain. By contrast, the first version of Fortran (1957) included the ability to break down a large program via the SUBROUTINE. So Fortran is the ancestor of modern programming languages while Cobol was a (popular) dead end. Fortran is also a “living fossil” in that physicists still write new code in Fortran. If you pull the plug on a supercomputer you are most likely interrupting a Fortran program. If you get a weather forecast it very likely comes from a model running in Fortran, e.g., GFS. There’s even https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-fortran for those who want to combine the 1957 innovation with AI Fever.
Here’s the team leader for Fortran: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Backus (he went on to help develop ALGOL and BNF; BNF remains important today for academics and compiler nerds and you can see the influence of ALGOL in C, Java, JavaScript, et al.). The only in-use (sort of) computer languages that don’t owe Backus a huge debt are, I think, SQL (database query language developed by IBM for the relational database, also developed by IBM (E.F. Codd, who will eventually be recognized as a female Scientist of Color)) and Lisp (though John McCarthy, who developed the first Lisp in 1958, gave credit to Fortran as an example of an efficient high-level language).
Grace Hopper was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama and a Navy ship was named after her. John Backus died without any recognition from non-nerds.
Philip, did not realize that Fortran went parallel. Fortran was one of the first of my coding languages as well and I do not recall it had parallel programming features. But if it runs on modern parallel supercomputers and main GPU vendors has its own version, it sure now has parallel programming – supporting constructs.
John Backus and partially his BNF are as celebrated in graduate CS programs as Grace Hopper and partially her Cobol are virtual unknown there; complete reversal from popular media world.
Around 40 years ago I read some old structured / recursive programming book, it called Cobol dangerous for its practitioners’ intellect, do not recall the exact quote. Cobol to programming is what NYT is to modern online media
It was Turing Award winner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra (ALGOL and structured programming in general plus contributions to multiprocessing operating systems (e.g., Windows or Unix that can run several programs simultaneously; the mainframes of the 1950s typically ran one program at a time)) who said “The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.”
Interestingly, this famous quote doesn’t appear in the Wikipedia page for the great scholar. Maybe Wokipedia won’t accept any implied criticism of female engineering achievements?
Backus, also a Turing Award recipient, furthermore designed FP, intended as a successor of Fortran.
“Can Programming Be Liberated from the von
Neumann Style? A Functional Style and Its
Algebra of Programs”
https://cs.wellesley.edu/~cs251/s19/notes/backus-turing-lecture.pdf
In this respect FP failed but I think you can see the ideas appear in various places, such as the Connection Machine of ancient days or Cuda (with a groovy C++ syntax).
Thanks Philip. Maybe it was Dijkstra whom I of course know sine after Fortran (and C) I learned his practical joke C++, I read this book, illegally copied on a knock-off of version of old Xerox access to which was controlled (not very well) by retired majors from Special Department, while still behind iron curtain which just started showing signs of decay, and I did not particularly pay attention to author’s name or book title. Maybe it was a citation from Dijkstra in the book, maybe it was his book. I definitely had carefully bound RAM (soviet knock-off of Xerox) copy of Ritchie’s C book back then, but I think that Cobol quote was from another book.
Back then I did not realize that Ritchie was teaching at Princeton until I visited Princeton a couple of times. for unrelated purposes. Somehow I remembered his names, because everyone call C book by his name.
Wikipedia –
“Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) was an American multinational corporation that provided information technology (IT) services and professional services. On April 3, 2017, it merged with the Enterprise Services line of business of HP Enterprise (formerly Electronic Data Systems) to create DXC Technology.”
@philg: “Goddard was a two-tiered plantation where the elites were federal government civil service employees and the slaves were employed by contractors. ”
1979 was long before paid 4-week+ furloughs for federal government worker elites.
Very solid letter but where is the section about your extensive struggle against repression by your relatively Privileged NASA colleagues, not to mention the adult GWU undergrads excluding and Marginalizing you (via wedgies, hazing, forced binge drinking, etc). Or your Native American roots (great aunt twice removed Elizabeth). Would being a mere youth rocket scientist (ok, rocket software engineer) cut it these days?
The whole of NASA as an organization has traditionally been sort of a “bureaucratic glue”, managing the contractors as a hierarchy, full of “Assistant Deputy Directors”. But really you weren’t a slave, or even a peon, since you were paid and not forced to work there. My capitalist-biased A.I. was reluctant, however, it did eventually compare NASA and the Soviet-style government, and found that NASA’s organization had similarities to the government of the U.S.S.R.–a purpose-built “shadow Soviet” to compete with them.
You really were more of a “rabochiy”, Phil, a heroic worker. People claim that NASA was a key in developing many innovative technologies. I would suggest what we needed here on Earth wasn’t exotic bio-incompatible materials and tech like mylar (for juice boxes!), doped silicon, and Tang, specialized to survive space; but rather materials that integrated with the terrestrial environment. NASA has produced a lot of valuable science–monetizing the artifacts could lead to a broken junk planet, which we will need to flee with rockets. Ask Musk, et al. I would have rather spent the money on sailboats and powered gliders than the folly of humanity in space. Or at least not rushing to capitalize on it (A.I. I’m looking at you) before we knew the effect on our planet.
A winding path from NASA to George Washington to MIT, all as an undergrad. Lions would have been ecstatic to get anything involving space, even 30 years after graduating. Suspect it was more common for undergrads to have gritty jobs like that 50 years ago, when NASA was more purpose driven. It’s just a pension fund now.
Can you see if my comment to Report from the trenches: The post-Trump de-woked Smithsonian (Vol II) was lost in your spam folder? It included two internal links which may have tripped your filter
Thanks, SN. That was tough to dig out from the spam! It’s Akismet, a WordPress plug-in, that does the AI magic.
I haven’t read many recommendation letters, but from I understand, that’s an average one, not a strong one, is that correct? It would be a function of how the language was used at that time, that’s why the question.
“Goddard was a two-tiered plantation where the elites were federal government civil service employees and the slaves were employed by contractors.”
When Obama shut down the Space Shuttle program in 2010, none of my NASA neighbors were affected; they just continued collecting pay checks. All of my NASA-contractor neighbors (more than a couple dozen) were out of work. A few found tech jobs in TX. The rest never found another job, retiring much earlier than expected.
Re Fortran, etc.
I studied Fortran, Cobol, Pascal, and C in the early ’80s in my undergrad CS program. At my first job, I was sent to class to learn Ada but all my and my coworkers’ on-the-job programming was in C; we never utilized out Ada training. Later, I studied SQL and C++ in grad school. I’ve long since neglected all that training, doing financial analysis & auditing for the past 25 years.
H1B guy wrote recommendation for Philg sir !!
At least it was positive and honest !
H-1B was created in 1990 when George H.W. Bush, replacing the H-1 from 1952. Dr. Bewtra probably came to the U.S. on a student via, not an H-1, because he was a graduate student at Cornell. Of course, employment prospects for Americans with PhDs in physics are terrible today. In the UK, “less than 0.5% of science PhD students will ever become full professors” https://physicsworld.com/a/the-academic-pyramid/ (maybe this number is a little higher in the US because we have lower standards for what constitutes a university/college?).
How different minds work.
A resume like yours, your skills, education, experience and accomplishments, seem like savant level genius to me.
As much as I tried to train my mind to think like that, I was never very good at high level math or computer programing. With the dream of becoming an Oceanographer, a research diver in particular, (Jacques Cousteau was my hero), I did well in bio and chem, but flunked out of calculus and barely made it through algebra II. Taking “a gap year” (or 7) from college, I discovered that I was pretty good at figuring out how things worked and how to fix them. Visualizing how a machine worked was more intuitive to me than finding the right equations to integrate or differentiate to a correct answer or trying to write, or find a single little fault, in endless lines of code.
Then I discovered racing. I met engineers who were great at calculating the physics and thermodynamics of engine design, the geometry and the forces involved in different suspension designs that could maximize the g-forces a tire could generate, but needed someone who could build, then start the engine and put all the parts of the car together into a functioning whole.
We became friends. Partners in crime. Later on, Computer Science experts became important with the rise of engine management software and data acquisition to interpret, adjust and redesign in the lab and at the track. I was more hands on. Like hands on a steering wheel. Or hands on the part that failed.
I wish I was smart enough, or maybe to be honest, had worked hard enough, on the math and computers, to combine the two the way my engineer hero’s like Mark Donahue or Bruce McLaren and others did. But its been a hell of a ride anyway just running with the way my mind works.
> A resume like yours, your skills, education, experience and accomplishments, seem like savant level genius to me.
The implication isn’t always bidirectional. Arguably, I’m a savant level genius too, almost every teacher told me I was the best student they ever had, but it didn’t lead to the success one might expect, and it has been continually surprising to me the run-of-the-mill lives my fellow gifted students lead in general, in the vein of “great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.” Not in any way to take away from Phil’s merits, it seems like tall, handsome, and a firm, insincere handshake are much better indicators of success–I run out of fingers counting the rich classmates I had who meet these criteria. Shit, look at what they did to a personal hero of mine, Aaron Swartz.
And before I go back to the pressure-washing driveways future my teachers and Central Planning envisioned for me, another highly correlated attribute of the rich and famous is having a rich daddy/mommy. And surely The Peoples’ Broadcasting System can’t be wrong:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/making-sense/analysis-if-youre-rich-youre-more-lucky-than-smart-and-theres-math-to-prove-it
I have redefined success as finding a great woman, getting enjoyment out of life and work, and having a comfortable roof over my head, so I feel quite successful by my own measure. (I can’t help but wonder, did Oppenheimer feel successful despite his “accomplishments”? He helped unleash a potential Armageddon, traditionally the devil’s work.) If they would only legalize weed in my state, I would damn near be in nirvana as I near retirement. Keeping up with the ultrawealthy Joneses is for the birds; Ferraris, Italianate marble and all; and it is in fact one of the reasons we are in such dire straits.