[FOSS] How does one respond to this line of questioning?

[Jon 'maddog' Hall]

>This whole conversation reminds me of the contention that existed
>between Cobol and Fortran programmers. Put one or more of either into a
>team with the others, and you're got a recipe for instant gray haired
>managers - especially when reviewing each other's code!

I worked with a man who wrote a program one time that was partially
written in:

o Fortran
o Cobol
o PL/I
o SNOBOL
o IBM assembler

It turns out that while he was writing it he was also taking a course in
comparative language design...and each part of the program was written
in the language they were studying that week.

When I found out about this (I had to find a really nasty bug in the
assembler part) I congratulated him because he was either guaranteed a
job for life maintaining this program, or he was going to be collecting
unemployment the next week because he was going to be fired.

It turns out that it was the second that actually happened.

md

P.S. Since I had had a similar course at my university, I was the only
other person in the 500 person programming staff that knew all the
languages that he used.