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Wave? Good-bye!

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IainB:
Ha...IainB.  I remember that, i still have all those business process documents you sent me.  In fact, I actually did complete that project, but "they" felt all that hardcore stuff was too much.  They have just last month started training the employees on that stuff.
-superboyac (July 03, 2013, 09:03 AM)
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I think I backed-up that Wave and it is now buried somewhere in my archives.
I'm curious to know exactly what you mean by "started training the employees on that stuff". Are you at liberty to disclose it?

40hz:
@IainB - I'll +1 with you on Wave. I could never see what the big deal (or even the gist of it) was with that orphan.
I've since ensconced Wave in the same gallery in my memory palace I've put Chandler, the APL programming language,  all of deconstructionist literary theory, transformational grammar, the 'new' math, and the concepts of Slavoj Žižek, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida in.
 ;D
-40hz (July 02, 2013, 10:33 AM)
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Hahaha, very droll, if a little unkind.
As for APL, yes, but I recall reading somewhere that APL had been used by Readers' Digest at one time to just about run their entire marketing operation - no?
-IainB (July 03, 2013, 08:26 AM)
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Perhaps. But kindness is too valuable an emotion to waste on total idiocy. Or something as half-baked as Wave.

Re: APL

I'm not sure about that. I cut my teeth on it on a Honeywell mainframe. I do remember it was fantastic at heavy-duty math and matrix calculations. And it was very 'dense' in that unique symbols replaced keywords. And you could do very complex things using very little code as this complete implementation of Conway's Life Game algorithm in APL shows:



But I also remember it was so difficult to to read (and even harder to remember how you did something 15 minutes after you keyed it in) that, for most APL programmers, "debugging" meant rewriting from scratch anything that didn't work right.

I don't miss it. 8)

superboyac:
Ha...IainB.  I remember that, i still have all those business process documents you sent me.  In fact, I actually did complete that project, but "they" felt all that hardcore stuff was too much.  They have just last month started training the employees on that stuff.
-superboyac (July 03, 2013, 09:03 AM)
--- End quote ---
I think I backed-up that Wave and it is now buried somewhere in my archives.
I'm curious to know exactly what you mean by "started training the employees on that stuff". Are you at liberty to disclose it?
-IainB (July 03, 2013, 09:27 AM)
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I can be vague.  My goal for the project was to create flowcharts that accurately represent the steps in a bureaucratic engineering project.  All the approvals, budget steps, branches that represent projects of differing dollar amounts, document/design deliveries.  Stuff like that.  The difficulty was that most of the people involved were less interested in an accurate depiction, and more interested in getting it off their plate.  So most of the flowcharts turned into probably over-simplified one-page drawings.  For example, a particular box right now in my mind may represent a whole page of procedures by itself.  But that would take quite a long time to do, and a lot of collaboration/cooperation.
So now they are training based on the simplified version.  Most likely, someone will get promoted as a result.

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