1. Fallen Gobbledy-Gook Card
I opened a book the other day, in the evening when I was looking for distraction, something other than one of those books over there in that pile by the chair, books that I opened before when I was looking for distraction.
A piece of paper fell out. It landed on the floor, and I could see it was a computer punch card from years ago. I kept a lot of them as bookmarks, usually the cast-offs of someone else’s programs. (Since I learned to program at the cusp of the punch card / CRT boundary, I didn’t have many card decks of my own &mdash at least nothing worth keeping.)
The code across the top of the card read:
IF(RRMAX.GT.DIST(IKEEP)) GO TO 1425
There was a time when that was my world, when I had to figure out what some guy was thinking when he wrote such code, where he was coming from, where he was going to, and why. It was part of the reality of FORTRAN. I must say, it’s a lost skill (if I ever had it in the first place). I have no patience for such gobbledy-gook anymore, and I pity the (mercifully few) people who do.
2. Dodged Gobbledy-Gook Bullet
I had a job interview years ago. It was with a group doing cool stuff with a big program that automated a lot of cool things. They were planning to write the next generation of the program and were ramping up the effort. It sounded exciting, but as the (long) interview went on, it became clear that the job they were hiring for was someone to take care of the old program while the cool cats got to build the new one. I had visions of code like this punch card in my head, and the appeal of the place immediately tanked.
“It looks to me,” I said, “like you’re looking for a maintenance programmer.”
They looked at me in silence. And well, that was pretty much that. It was a very close call.