Life-like programs

I started programming about 1969 on a PDP-8 at the COMSAT earth station in Hawaii. My first was a program to change voltage readings (which I had to do as a tech) to dbm values, because those are what had to be entered into a log book. It helped allot and I started to fantasize about becoming a programmer. ^^ The next programming I got to do was in the 70s at a military site, which had an XDS Sigma-5 (the last manually wire-wrapped computer). It could handle 64 bit numbers which inspired me to try some number theory stuff. I had many fun nights running FORTRAN programs on that big old machine. :)

My first home machine was a K-PRO and with It, I learned Z-80 machine code, assembly language, Q-Basic and finally FORTH. I used FORTH to write a 3-D graphic program for the K-PRO. But before I could sell my first copy, K-PRO went bust. I had spent so much time on that graphic program, and didn’t want it to be a waste, the only thing I could think of, was to re-write it for the PC. I studied about what languages were being used for PC programs such as PASCAL, C and C++. That’s where I started to learn about “structured programs”. To my dismay, :crying: I found that every program I had ever written was completely un-structured (GOTO all over the place). I gave up on all of it, and became a tour guide in Hawaii.

It was only last week when I happened on a science article on the ENCODE project sponsored by NIH. Their research has found that the actual genes in the genome are just data and the other 99 per-cent of the genome appears to be the program that tells what and how many genes are to do! Here is an excerpt from their paper.

The ENCODE computational metaphor:
Genes as “loosely coded” routines

“The new ENCODE perspective does not, of course, fit with the metaphor of the gene as a simple callable routine in a huge operating system.
In this new perspective, one enters a gene “routine” in many different ways in the framework of alternative splicing and lattices of long transcripts. The execution of the genomic OS does not have as neat a quality as this idea of repetitive calls to a discrete subroutine in a normal computer OS. However, the framework of describing the genome as executed code still has some merit.
That is, one can still understand gene transcription in terms of parallel threads of execution, with the caveat that these threads do not follow canonical, modular subroutine structure. Rather, threads of execution are intertwined in a rather “higgledy-piggledy” fashion, very much like what would be described as a sloppy, unstructured computer program code with lots of GOTO statements zipping in and out of loops and other constructs.”

So the only thing wrong with my programs, those many years ago, was they were too life like because I did them on my own and had not learned it in school! So maybe sometimes you have to say the hell with “structured programs” and make programs a little more life-like to have them last longer. The genome program has been working over a billion years!