Unintended Consequences

I use Lesieur too, in potato salad and egg mayonnaise sandwiches.
Why are French sandwiches so dry with uninspiring fillings?

Probably because most French people I know like their bread to “croquer sous la dent”. Soft loaf sandwiches only really developed in the 90’s, after M&S made a foray into the French shopping scene (give me Pain Bagnat any day). Look at how “Paul”, the reference chain franchise in freshly made sandwiches “French-style” still uses mostly crusty bread types instead of soft soggy loaf slices.

I should add that I’m a fan of soft loaf slices in general, but I dislike both the lack of imagination, and the slightly less than awe-inspiring quality of French soft-loaf sandwiches, but am equally appreciative of sandwiches from “Paul”, which I find are pretty varied and interesting as things go. However, if you have soft gums or tooth issues, they are definitely an issue !

Perhaps because people still eat lunch here? And although times are changing (sadly) you still have few workers grabbing an overpriced sandwich to eat at their desk, so not a big enough market. Except at stations or some busy cities where Paul flourishes.

If a lack of sandwich fillings is the price to pay for maintaining a quality of life here, then I’ll stick to workers having proper lunch breaks.

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I don’t see why one has to be at the expense of the other.
I make egg mayonnaise sandwiches in a baguette as well as with our own bread.

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COBOL was for wimps, no real programmer ever used COBOL.
Real men used Assembler :face_with_hand_over_mouth:
BTW, Assembler allowed you to do so much more that any high level language. For example self modifying code where you could actually change the machine code in flight. it was fun, not just coding.

No 9 in the “Real Programmer’s Don’t…” list :slight_smile:

Real programmers …

  1. don’t write specs. Users should consider themselves lucky to get any programs at all and take what they get.

  2. don’t comment their code. If it was hard to write, it should be hard to read.

  3. don’t write application programs, they program right down on the bare metal. Application programming is for feebs who can’t do systems programming.

  4. don’t eat quiche. Real programmers don’t even know how to spell quiche. They eat Twinkies, Coke and palate-scorching Szechwan food.

  5. don’t draw flowcharts. Flowcharts are, after all, the illiterate’s form of documentation. Cavemen drew flowcharts; look how much it did for them.

  6. don’t read manuals. Reliance on a reference is a hallmark of the novice and the coward.

  7. programs never work right the first time. But if you throw them on the machine they can be patched into working in only a few 30-hours debugging sessions.

  8. don’t use Fortran. Fortran is for wimpy engineers who wear white socks, pipe stress freaks, and crystallography weenies. They get excited over finite state analysis and nuclear reactor simulation.

  9. don’t use COBOL. COBOL is for wimpy application programmers.

  10. never work 9 to 5. If any real programmers are around at 9 am, it’s because they were up all night.

  11. don’t write in BASIC. Actually, no programmers write in BASIC, after the age of 12.

  12. don’t document. Documentation is for simps who can’t read the listings or the object deck.

  13. don’t write in Pascal, or Bliss, or Ada, or any of those pinko computer science languages. Strong typing is for people with weak memories.

  14. know better than the users what they need.

  15. think structured programming is a communist plot.

  16. don’t use schedules. Schedules are for man- ager’s toadies. Real programmers like to keep their manager in suspense.

  17. think better when playing adventure.

  18. don’t use PL/I. PL/I is for insecure momma’s boys who can’t choose between COBOL and Fortran.

  19. don’t use APL, unless the whole program can be written on one line.

  20. don’t use LISP. Only effeminate programmers use more parentheses than actual code.

  21. disdain structured programming. Structured programming is for compulsive, prematurely toilet-trained neurotics who wear neckties and carefully line up sharpened pencils on an otherwise uncluttered desk.

  22. don’t like the team programming concept. Unless, of course, they are the Chief Programmer.

  23. have no use for managers. Managers are a necessary evil. Managers are for dealing with personnel bozos, bean counters, senior planners and other mental defectives.

  24. scorn floating point arithmetic. The decimal point was invented for pansy bedwetters who are unable to “think big.”

  25. don’t drive clapped-out Mavericks. They prefer BMWs, Lincolns or pick-up trucks with floor shifts. Fast motorcycles are highly regarded.

  26. don’t believe in schedules. Planners make up schedules. Managers “firm up” schedules. Frightened coders strive to meet schedules. Real programmers ignore schedules.

  27. like vending machine popcorn. Coders pop it in the microwave oven. Real programmers use the heat given off by the cpu. They can tell what job is running just by listening to the rate of popping.

  28. know every nuance of every instruction and use them all in every real program. Puppy architects won’t allow execute instructions to address another execute as the target instruction. Real programmers despise such petty restrictions.

  29. don’t bring brown bag lunches to work. If the vending machine sells it, they eat it. If the vending machine doesn’t sell it, they don’t eat it. Vending machines don’t sell quiche.

  30. Real programmers know that the word is disk, not disc. Disc is a definite commie plot put forth by blubbering quiche eaters.

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‘According to Reuters, you can find 220 billion lines of code still in production. From many federal government agencies to your local bank, COBOL is still in use. An estimated 43% of banking systems and 95% of ATM swipes utilize COBOL code’

Good enough for me :slight_smile:

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That was a big post Paul. Let an old systems programmer turned exec respond.

Much of the above is tongue in cheek, but in reality I was lucky to work with very clever people in an emerging industry. It’s a shit industry now full of exploitation and battery chicken development, I wouldn’t have anybody close to me work in it.

If your not a programmer Peter, with all due respect, you possibly don’t get the joke.

I don’t understand all the computer talk, BUT desperate to know is that you John with your cool glasses and moustache and Danish fisherman’s jumper :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: ?? Respect!!!

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Just cut ‘n’ paste. :slight_smile:

I did actually do a little coding in Lisp, though I mostly did the non-Lispy bits of the project involved with interfacing to X & Motif ( IXI initially which was horrendous but the project became a one man band and I ported the whole thing to OpenMotif for him and 99% of the bugs with the UI vanished overnight).

a practical solution… it’s fooking cold in serious computer rooms with the aircon on :wink:

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I did Cobol at college in 1981/82 - sadly never got to be a ‘real programmer’. I was in operations for many years and had a great time :slight_smile: OS/VS1 VM DOS/VSE/Power MVS even worked on a Perkin Elmer at BT !
Then migrated to open systems, AIX,Solaris and found my niche in data protection using TSM (tivoli storage manager).

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Brilliant stuff :grinning: I remember there was only one Perken Elmer in Ireland. Bank of Ireland or Allied Irish Banks bought it to run some banking application that only ran on PE kit. They didn’t put it in their main datacentre but in the basement of their head office a few weeks later the basement flooded and ruined the PE, so they had to but another one.

I did a lot of work on VSE but VM remains my favorite operating system. I wrote a lot of assembler code for apps running on CMS. A brilliant environment. Like so many IBM inventions they never exploited it enough. They should have ported it to the PC instead of using the dog DOS. But in those days IBM divisions didn’t talk to one another, in fact they competed with one another. That was one of the core reasons it crashed in the mid nineties.

For too long technophobe IBM accountants (who, in effect, ran the Company into the ground) focussed on the 90% margins that mainframes generated and saw no value in software or services. It took Gerstner to fix that.

Olsen made the same mistake in DEC, he sold RDB and kept the declining hardware business. That was another IBM faux pas, they invented relational databases only for Larry Ellison to make all the money from them. I’d hate to make a list of all the fortunes IBM has made for hangers on… Microsoft, EMC, Intel (IBM rescued them in the 80s because they’d chosen the 8088 for the PC)…etc.

But what about poor old Xerox? They invented Ethernet, the GUI (Windows), the mouse… and never made a penny out of them. :worried:

Indeed it is Tory. All Systems programmers were cool in the day :joy: I even had hair.

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