[Info-vax] The Gender Fluid IT Crisis

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 7/29/2017 7:33 PM, seasoned_geek wrote:
> On Saturday, July 29, 2017 at 5:26:56 PM UTC-5, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> <quote>
>> IT workers put in millions and millions of hours fixing things
>> incompetent management was too greedy to fix.
>> </quote>
>>
>> Guess what. In most companies the IT workers do what management tell
>> them and Y2K issues got fixed because management told iT workers
>> to fix them.
> 
> Spoken like an academic without even one day of production maintenance.
> 
> They got fixed because the ratings agencies threatened to downgrade
> credit ratings and issue sell ratings on the company's instruments.
> Then and only then did the criminal fraud of right-sizing reverse
> costing both the public and shareholders millions in value. Most
> large companies were staffed well enough before the Gartner lauded
> criminal fraud to have handled Y2K at a slow and steady pace and
> management was told this before they started on the slash and burn
> for this quarter's bonus check.
That may or may not explain why management ordered the IT workers
to fix Y2K.

But it does not change the fact that you claim was simply wrong.
Management did fix it.

#<quote>
#For COBOL programmers with extensive copylibs this won’t be much of a
#problem. COBOL never had the concept of a boolean, or at least it didn’t
#in the early standards versions. All you had was PIC X or 9 and a bunch
#of 88 levels.
#...
#You poor bastards using a database though. How many of you have that
#stored in a boolean column? How many stored procedures are you going to
#have to try and find both in production and development? Not just in the
#database, but where they are actually called, tracking back to fix every
#data type along the way?
#
#You poor bastards using BASIC, FORTRAN or some other language where some
#fool decided bit-flags should be used to store boolean values. That’s
#all over your system. You cannot even hope to search by name through the
#code because not everyone will have used the named mask.
#</quote>

>> Crap.
>>
>> Practically no one use BOOLEAN for storing sex even if that
>> data type is available. BOOLEAN is for storing TRUE or FALSE
>> not anything with two values.
>>
>> ENUM, CHAR, INT is what is used for what is truly
>> an enumeration. None of these have problems with more
>> than two values.

> Once again spoken like an academic without even one day of supporting
> production code. Many of those very same systems with Y2K problems
> using those 3GL languages stored Sex and a rash of other things in
> bit-flag fields.

So you admit that the your original claim of BOOLEAN being
used for sex was crap and you are now trying to make the claim
that BIT was used?

>                  They did it for the _EXACT_ same reason, storage
> wasn't cheap. One single longword with each bit potentially masked
> off to mean something. I say potentially because bit-flag fields tend
> to get added to records in groups when you run out of existing
> bit-flags. That was done so there was only one conversion of existing
> records. Usually added 3-4 at a time. Sometimes the unused longword
> fields meant for bit-flags would get consumed by some other data
> need.

Many things are possible.

But the combination of storing year in 2 digit text form and sex
in 1 bit does not seem very likely.

Arne