The Sins of Youth

I have never taken any courses in computer programming; I am completely self-taught. This is not so impressive; a great many good programmers are self-taught. However, I taught myself back in the 1960s, when programming languages were more primitive. I learned FORTRAN, a clumsy language designed for scientific programming. If you use variable names like "I," "J," and "K" for index variables for loops, you are using one legacy of FORTRAN: It defined all variables beginning with the letters I through N to be integers, while everything else was a floating point variable.

Now, learning to program using FORTRAN was rather like learning to drive in a demolition derby, and I seem to have learned all the wrong lessons. My youthful exuberance could not tolerate dull variable names like I or J; I wanted something with a little panache! I therefore created a set of variables with colorful names like KKRAP, and so on. It wasn't a very utilitarian naming system; it was hard to remember what the variables meant. But it seemed right to me, and I was so intensely involved in my code that I could keep all the variables straight in my head. However, this did cause me some problems when I ran into difficulty and needed help. The university computer center provided consulting programmers to help out users, and when I took my problems there, as often as not, the consulting programmer was a woman. In such cases, she would become flustered asking clarifying questions such as, "So, what function does NFUCK perform here?"