Initial development projects at college

As we were on a Computer related career, many classes required from us to develop a computer system. The most common language for development was FoxPro. Sometimes for graphical applications we used Visual Basic, but only for easy projects; I started using it from version 3. At that time MSDOS was the most common Operating System, but graphical applications were starting to get used.

Initial development courses

At college we had 4 courses for development, those where more focused for us to had Language knowledge. Those classes were Pascal, GW-BASIC, COBOL and FoxPro, in that order. Programming Logic was an issue in those times as classes where focus to the language and not to the logic; also, not all of us had a computer at home, so, we had to visit the Lab for computer time. Time might not be too expensive, but availability was another issue.

At Pascal course, I had some problems with coding as I as to create big programs, most of them long IF Statements and the following of my core was hard to other persons, I took little attention to this issue until tow more courses. In a midterm exam, my teacher, Engineer Diana Margarita (Diana Margarita is guilty of my carrer), gave me a low grade for my code, I had to type it in the PC and show her the result to reconsider my grade.

Second course was GW-BASI, this course was given by Engineer Danilo, he had a “different” way to teach, but was good..

COBOL was challenging for the language itself and for the teacher, Engineer Zamora, he user to explain and write in 3 different whiteboards, when he finish the explanation we start “copying” to the computers for later execution. By these times, I was realizing about the importance of programming logic and I was writing better code. As I had a typewriting ability, I usually finish the coding before others, after finishing I walk the room watching others work, occasionally I try to help me classmates with their doubts.

FoxPro was a good course, it was teach be Engineer Juan Antonio Villarreal, we had very good ideas for teaching, almost always too different of other teachers. He use to talk about the “German Techniques” which were only intense use of the language to accomplish some tasks, usually it toke more than three commands in a single line which were only “translated” if you have an advance knowledge of the language; many were afraid of those techniques, to the point that were banned to some projects because of their complexity. Usually, the midterm exam was something like this:

• Compute the 5% monthly tax needed to be deducted for all employees of a company. The period to compute is any given month. Read employees form a database. Each employee might have up to 2 salary raises in the period, these raises are stored also in the database. The only input is the month to compute, the exit is a report showing Employee number and name, total tax to be deducted.

When I first made this exam I used at lead 3 sheets of paper both sides. One day I was at the bus, going to college thinking in the exam and suddenly I realize how to do it in a better way; when I finish coding it, I was only 60 lines long, counting blank lines. This single exam and the former solution I did for it change the way I code for the future.