I am now (mostly) retired after a career consisting largely in system design and programming. Predominantly, I did application programming but also did a significant amount of systems level work as well. I worked in both Windows and Linux, with C/C++ as my usual choice of language. I have programmed in Pascal, Fortran, Assembly Language(s), and COBOL (when held captive at gunpoint). In Windows applications, Visual Basic was usually the language specified and used. At one company I did operating system level programming to capture program output directed at any of a number of mechanical line printer and converting it to print on laser and ink jet printers. To have modified all the applications (developed over years) necessary to accomplish this would have required a number of people with a large budget. With this done at such a high level, they were able to dump their remaining line printers rather inexpensively. I also worked at one point for a well known developer of programming tools written for Visual Basic (and Visual C/C++). They were developed in Visual C/C++. My last major project was to develop a Windows Visual Basic (like) IDE. All of the necessary system controls (text boxes, editable grids, tree displays, combo boxes, drop down lists, etc., including their events) were written in C and were compiled with Perl source code to become Perl extensions. The company developed web applications with the finished program. In retirement, generally as a volunteer but occasionally as a paid consultant I have developed websites and modified web shopping cart systems. Eight years ago I developed a blog site using WordPress. At the time I could see that it was actually very suitable for content management. Recently, I did a site for a law firm using WordPress, using a third party theme and various plugins. It has been, in the intervening time, the CMS of choice for a huge number of websites and has spawned a huge aftermarket for third party tools.
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