What is it you do to earn a living? Why?

@helenS As you said, to each his own, but...
I find the imagination produces creativity in writing stores much more fascinating. Sadly, even stories get tossed at some point too. What you do is a necessity... what I do is entertainment.

@helenS Why do I have this feeling your code is much better documented than mine 😬😁

@Coletracer Writing programs is highly entertaining! I am constantly amazed that I am paid to do what I would be doing for fun anyway 😁

@Elessar Golden rule: never comment working code 😁

@helenS If it's enjoyable, it's so worthwhile! Good for you!

@Coletracer Thank you! 🌷

@helenS At the moment, I'm eating blackberries and whip cream... That's something else that is enjoyable!

@helenS Unfortunately I have to, otherwise I forget what it does the next day 😅

@Elessar A friend of mine never changes the source code. He modifies the executable. In fact the exe file and the source code don't have much in common anymore 😄

@helenS Damn, good luck debugging 😅 for the sake of my sanity I've decided to stick(out of education and personal projects) with "high level" programming languages only; with the expectations product management and customers have it's virtually impossible taking time to fine tune code, or debug the occasional leaks you have when you manually manage memory and are in a rush to deliver something. Especially when the code has to be asynchronous, cross platform, and inevitably involves a ton of callbacks 😬 so I've no idea how my executables (or intermediate code) even look like, except when it's some codepath that needs to be fast fast

@Elessar Same here – I write almost all my program in Perl; I sometimes call some C code from Perl.
I never go below good old C.

@helenS From my POV even C would be low level 😬😅 but yeah, never tried Perl actually; I'm mostly on C# and Pascal/Delphi in my everyday coding at work, with occasional projects in whichever other language/tool I need for the purpose (I try to be polyglot 😌). Now that it's getting generics, I think I'm exploring Golang (and later, Rust) for system/utility programming

@Elessar ...oh and I thought Pascal is a dead horse...

@helenS Computer languages never die.... An old friend of mine recently got a contract revamping some PL/1 code. He asked me if I was interested too - but I only used that very sporadically for a couple of years not one of my best languages.

I was still using Fortran up until I retired in 2018. Every now and then someone in the group would ask me to look over some Fortran code if there was an issue as a fresh pair of eyes. Most of my sons PhD was fundamentally Fortran with him then using Python to produce the graphs etc.

My main languages (3GLs that is) were Fortran, Pascal and C. C probably the most I used with Fortran the longest. I wrote a lot of assembler in the 80s Z80, Z8000, 68000 and 6502 etc.

@helenS Not when you have to maintain a 25+ years old Delphi Win32-only project 😅 the recent-most versions allows you to write cross-platform apps/programs, but I still find it rather tedious and slow to work with tbh

@OldBrit Fortran is certainly not a dead horse. I know positively it's the main language that it used in computational chemistry and computational quantum physics. Fortran IS it, why use anything else?

@helenS Yep - well my last job was in supporting researchers at a large research led London university... so those kind of areas were exactly where I got asked to help out. My son is a planetary physicist so definitely the big data crunching on magnetospheres and electrical currents in the atmospheric plasmas that's mostly still Fortran due to the amount of accurate routines already readily available.

@OldBrit I think the Fortran compiler is really optimized for number crunching.

I love what you do!👍😊🌷@helenS

@Oster1 Oh thaaank you!!
🌼🌼🌼 <== flowers for you!