Class with the Code Cowboy

My training class is fascinating. Not because of the subject matter. Nor, in fact, because the "teacher" is doing more than reading us the manual. (Oh that that were the case!) No, it's fascinating because it's being taught by an honest-to-goodness Code Cowboy.

If you're a software engineer, you may recognize the Code Cowboy from his swagger and assertions that are similar to these precious little gems meeted out to us today:

"This here is an object. They call everything object-oriented these days, but that's just a fancy word for a structure. It's all the same - see how you reference it with name dot property? Same way you access structures. *snort* You could do all of this in COBOL."

"The Y2K problem wasn't COBOL's fault. We could've had a four-digit year, but heck, with the small memory size on machines back in the day, once they started making us use procedural programming methodologies, all that swapping gunked up the works so we had to drop back to a two digit year. Everything would've been fine if they'd just let us keep programming top down."

"At least with COBOL your code was legible. These programming languages today are just trying to make things difficult to read with their brackets, parentheses and semi-colons, there's no functionality there we didn't have back in the 60s."

And so on, and so forth. He also made a point of asking all the men if they were programmers (most of them were not.) He never asked the women (of which there were four, two of whom, myself included, are programmers.) I was half expecting some of the "female programmer" jokes from college to resurface. You know the ones - What's the difference between a female programmer and trash? The trash gets taken out twice a week. And so on, and so forth.

I suppose it's at least good that he was semi-equal-opportunity and bashed anyone who was or saw any merit under any circumstance for assembly programming. Cause after all, "There's never a call for you to be swapping around registers." I suspect the next two days are going to be very long.