Hi from Bill
Back to Introduce Yourself forum
Hi,
I'm Bill from the UK. I'm 75 years old and retired from
IT systems management 25 years ago. I began programming
professionally in the early 1960s in COBOL, assembler, C and
a little Fortran on mainframe machines, and various others
on PCs as a hobby.
Since retirement I have taught myself C# and just this month
begun to add Python to my repertoire. I must confess I have
no particular goal in mind taking on another new language - I
just enjoy programming and like to keep my brain active.
Unfortunately owing to age and the trials it brings, I've had
to give up my other major hobby interest: entomology. From the
mid-1970s up to the end of the last century, I majored in
Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) with other orders thrown in.
Since retirement I worked on Diptera (flies) exclusively.
I would like to say a big thank you for your work in creating and
moderating this site. I've found working through the exercises
very helpful in consolidating what I have learned so far, and
on occasion pushing the envelope further.
Hi Bill! Thanks for dropping message here!
I somewhat feel envious as you seem to hit very interesting era when IT was emerging :)
It looks you find it easy enough to master new language - Python? I know it's simple enough (and quite popular, so I decided to use it for future version of the site so people can at least peek inside) - but when I tried it for the first time several years ago - I put it aside for few months because it seemd too unusual...
About entomology :)
Googling hints that you worked in this professionally at least at some period. That is quite impressive for me personally - I just shall try to explain. During school years I grew to despise biology (school was more inclined to physics and math). However my biology teachers were kind enough to allow me two re-exams so I wasn't kicked out of this school for unsufficient grade in biology. And while reading books to prepare myself for this re-exams I suddenly found the topic is much more interesting than I thought. Later I got some book by Jean Henri Fabre - and to my surprise I re-read it several times in a couple of years. Then I've found some more books by him, luckily. Though I easily forgot much of the things I read, with the help of wiki nowadays they open the world from very different side for me :)
So I shall check internets more and see what I can understand about insects of Cheshire, right? :)
Hi Rodion
You're right about starting when IT was just emerging - my first team leader was just making the transition to COBOL
from machine code, believe it or not. Jumping ahead many years, one of the languages with which I had a brief (failed)
dalliance was Prolog - and that's what I call unusual! I could not get along with that at all.
My school experience was the direct opposite of yours. Though I had a keen interest in biology, it was not regarded
as a "proper" science by my school, and A-stream pupils were not allowed to study it as a subject. So my entomological
knowledge was all self-taught at a much later age. My only semi-professional role in that field was a brief period
after taking early retirement as a subcontracted consultant doing field survey work. I undertook that merely to
supplement my pension, but quickly realized I did not need the extra income and reverted to bugs as an unpaid hobby,
voluntarily contributing data to various biological recording organisations.
All the best Bill
PS. The link you give for a markdown editor no longer works. The one I'm using is https://jbt.github.io/markdown-editor/