A Farewell to Arms

The other day I needed to write a script that would download images I captured during photo walks and copy them from my camera’s SD card to a folder on my Mac laptop partitioned by year, then date.

I got the ChatGPT write the entire program in NodeJS in four iterations, as well as constructing an Automator script that turned the utility into a desktop shortcut. All took 20 minutes top that went into engineering ChatGPT prompts and pushing the code to Github for source control.

During turbulent years of late 70’s, our university studies were often disrupted by political unrest, demonstrations and violence.

I was an Electrical Engineering student then. In the first year we were taught Fortran IV programming language. We used to write our assignments on punch cards. There were no computer monitors back then. Every line of code needs to be punched on a card using a punch machine. Then we used to assemble decks of cards like bricks and submitted them to an office in the Computer Science building to be processed by a computer. We used to wait for many hours for a printed output. If you dropped a card or mixed the order, your program would not run. Even if it ran ok and produced output, our solution could be wrong. It was a time consuming, torturous ordeal.

In 1978 or 1979 I received a present. It was a HP-25, Hewlett Packard Scientific Programmable hand-held calculator.

image courtesy of HP Museum

The owner's handbook ended with:

"If you have worked completely through this handbook, you should have a very good knowledge of all the basic functions of the HP-25. But in fact you've only begun to see the power of the calculator. You'll come to understand it better and appreciate it more as you use the HP-25 daily to solve even the most complex mathematical expressions. At your fingertips you have a tool that was unavailable to Archimedes, Galileo, or Einstein. The only limits to the flexibility of the HP-25 are the limits of your own mind."

HP-25 was programmable with 49 lines of memory. I even wrote a matrix multiplication program so that I could finish my Power Systems Analysis homework early and escape to a pub to meet my friends for drinks.

I fell in love with programming using HP-25’s very limited programming language rather than a much more advanced Fortran IV. Holding a computer in my hands felt like being Superman, whereas Fortran’s punch cards and punch machines felt like the Stone Age.

I spent most of my career as a software engineer. I learned other programming languages: Assemblers, C, Pascal, Basic, Cobol, C++, C#, Pascal, Perl, Python, Javascript, Node JS and so on. I wrote programs, often beautiful programs.

Forty-five years fast forward, the art of programming as I learned, took pride in, fell in love and earned my living with can now be offloaded to Artificial Intelligence. I am no longer Superman. My powers are stolen like a piece of Krypton rock is held next to me.