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anadem

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FORTH got me my first paid programming work in 1981: a management suite for a water company, with customer accounting and river water-flow checks (reported in a synthesized voice)! A fun project for which I home-rolled the FORTH interpreter, thanks to a book "Threaded Interpretive Languages" by R.G. Loeliger.

Totally! At 87 that's gutsy! My very first paid programming work was in Forth on a 6502 platform in the '60s, building a networked accounting and flow management program for a water company, but I'm now 81 and very glad to be retired.

Loeliger's 'Threaded Interpretive Languages' jumpstarted my career in the late 1970s: I built a networked water management system based on their code, which was my first big project, earning me £1,500. Note that there's a bug in their code (I no longer remember exactly where) so getting it off the ground was tricky.

Yes, it's a lovely book and led me to my first paid project over 40 years ago! Using the book I built a Forth to monitor the local water authority systems, with water-level tracking and customer accounting & billing, implemented on a home-brewed network of North Star PCs. Iirc there's a minor bug in one of the base subroutines as written though now I don't remember what it was. But I still have the book :-)

I think navigating code definitely has a relationship to navigating meatspace, and the ability to internalize a view of the code space makes for a good programmer.

I'm long retired now, but attribute a lot of my programming ability to having had very poor sight in early childhood thus having to keep a mental map of my surroundings.

you have to keep maintaining and adjusting the pressure chamber to get the right pressure for the correct operation of the two check valves.

That may have been true of the pumps you made, but it's not correct in all cases. There was a ram pump where I grew up (in the 1950s) which worked year round to lift water from the spring line to a house higher up; it never needed adjustment and got almost no maintenance, it just worked and kept on working.

About a year ago I had the same attitude to antibiotics as you, but a basic antibiotic prescription led me to develop a Clostridiodes difficile [0] infection. People need to be aware that C. diff is AWFUL, and can easily occur after antibiotic treatment. It's totally debilitating, can even kill you, and is difficult and expensive to treat, often recurring after treatment.

I'm very fortunate in having a daughter who's a doctor, but had to use a $5,000 antibiotic to get cured.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/cdiff/what-is.html