[Sussex] bork bork bork

[Steve Dobson]

Nik

On Sun, Feb 16, 2003 at 08:53:29PM +0000, Nik Butler wrote:
> I therefore wonder is we could draw matrix of languages and platforms
> and so which of us did what and where and with which.

That could get to be a long, long list - so here goes:

Timeframe   Platforms   Languages   Project
---------   ---------   ---------   -------

1980-1984   Zilog Z80   BASIC       Course work

1982-1984   CBM Pet     BASIC       Course work
                        6502[1]     A-Level project mainly.

1984-1988   VAX         Pascal      Degree course work
                        C, Cobol

1988-1999   Sun &       C, C++      Turnkey systems for the MoD mostly
            Embedded                Some of it was loaded on to fighter
                                    aircrafts and flown - real time
                                    stuff mainly.

1999-2001   Sun, Linux, C, C++      Various control systems
            FreeBSD     CORBA
                        Java

2001-       Sun, HP-UX, C++, CORBA  An N-Tier Warehouse Management System
            AIX                     (very boring stuff)

[1] 6502 Machine code - not assembler.  The chip in the Pet could understand
    the numonics but I had to work out all the address - there were no label
    support - the machine code was written stright into memory - good fun.

>                                                        When we do that
> we can then decide upon which language would be best suited for handling
> data entry and which database is suited for storage.

I'm surprised that you're asking the such open ended questions!  Which 
database?  Well my questions are: How much data?  Update rates?  Budget?
And data enry is determined on all the above and many more.  Where is the
data being entered?  Just consider two very different data entry enviroments:
Amazon Web Site and a High Street store's stock take.  For Amazon then some
sort of web scripting language.  For the store they use those PDAs with a bar-
code scanner - much easier than writing in down on a peice of paper and they
typing it all into a web page.

What I'm really asking here is "What are you getting at?"

Steve