Introduction - test - Fedora mailing-lists

19 Feb 2018


      Hi!
My credentials are in electrical engineering and just before I retired 
(almost three year ago) I was reading through the Intel spec's on the 
latest chip sets ; as I needed to understand physical data flow 
bottlenecks. From early childhood I was not only interested in 
electronics, but in electronic computers. This stuff is something I do 
because I really like it, not because it was my profession.
I have programmed in many languages. There are several I only wrote one 
program with just to explore the language. There are some examples 
below. Sometimes I am still amazed by the number of new languages being 
published. After I look them over though I laugh at the huge 
similarities to the ones the pre-existed them. My first experience as a 
student was with with Fortran and SPS on an old IBM 1620 I found “laying 
around”. After that I wrote a fair amount of machine code (hex) and some 
BAL for IBM 360. After I was working and microprocessors became 
available, there weren't any programmers around for them; so the 
electrical engineers who implemented the processors in hardware also 
wrote the software. A fact I was very happy about. I wrote hex code for 
the Motorola 6800 and later I did a little for the 68000. I also wrote a 
fair amount of code in Pascal on a VAX computer. Pascal was all they had 
on that machine and they didn't want to buy another license.
Later when PCs became available in a form similar to those commonly in 
use today, I wrote useful code in Smalltalk, Lisp, Java. The first two 
were connected to an AI project I worked on. The Java was control code 
for a mechanism not for web pages. In the 1980s I was sent by one of the 
companies I worked for to take C classes. I took all classes, but then 
the project was canceled; so I never had a chance to use it. Things I 
learned in the C classes, like the ease with which memory leaks were 
created, lead be to have a strong aversion for it . I never pursued C 
after that.
Since I abandon Windows, about F16 ago, and started using Fedora, I've 
been writing in Python. I've always held the opinion that code should be 
well organized and easy to follow. After I wrote my first thousand lines 
of python I went and got the style guide and found to my satisfaction 
that my code, with one exception was compliant. I've never taken classes 
in Python; so I won't present myself as being ready to start writing 
Python for Fedora. Though I just purchased a course from the Teaching 
Company that uses Python for all the code work. I haven't started it yet 
so I can say more about it.
My tiny contributions to Fedora so far has been running the canned 
regression tests on Linux. I got a FAS account so I could submit the 
results, but since I haven't joined a group yet that was about all I 
could do. As I was think further about it it seemed like testing would 
be a good place to start.