Lost Learnings, an Introduction

Lost Learnings

Lost Learnings is a blog about things we learn and forget.  We learn, we learn some more, we learn still more, and then we start losing the things we don't use everyday.  Some of it we never do forget -- like how to ride a bike, for example.  But much of it is "going, going, gone" as the ballpark announcer shouts while a long fly ball goes over the outfield fence.

Remember all that set notation we had to learn back in grade school?  Maybe it seemed silly at the time, learning something that  was obscure and didn't have any purpose.  Now, SQL is the language of the database, and it's all about sets.  

Some of the things we learned we'll never need again.  In my career, I learned to program computers in about a dozen languages using half-dozen operating systems.   I'll probably never write a program in FOCAL, or PAL8, or MANTIS again.  And I doubt I'll ever see another Univac mainframe or DEC mini-computer. 

But some of that old stuff was fun.  IBM's PL/I language was my favorite language, and much of what I learned about PL/I is still applicable in REXX and SAS programming today.  I still have a working Heathkit H-8, the computer equivalent of a Ford Model T.  The H-8 was a fun machine, and I learned a lot about computing building it, studying the logic diagrams, and learning to program in 8080/8085 assembler.  

Perhaps the moral here is that much of we learn is foundational.  Remembering sets from grade school helps with SQL programming.  Learning PL/I helped me program in REXX or SAS.  Learning 8080/8085 assembler helped me program IBM PC assembler and IBM 370 assembler.

Much of what we've forgotten is useful and applicable now.  Some of the algorithms I coded in COBOL at another job would still be useful today.  Things like SQL travel pretty well from one vendor's database (IBM DB2) to another (Oracle 11g).  And there's a lot of odd things that I learned along the way, often doing research for things that didn't get implemented, sometimes learning how to solve a problem for its own sake. 

So, in this blog I'll talk about problems and ideas and solutions now, before they, like the long fly ball, are going, going, gone.