[PLUG] [plug-announce] Wed May 2 - PLUG Central - "A Punch Card Ate My Program" by Walt Mankowski (7pm at USP)

["Paul L. Snyder" <paul@pataprogramming.com>]

------------------ PLEASE NOTE ------------------
If the doors to Griffith Hall are locked, USP
security will let you into the building if you
call them. Please see below in this message for
full instructions.
-------------------------------------------------

PLUG Central will be meeting on Wednesday, May 2 at USP in 
Philadelphia, beginning at 7pm. Directions to the meeting location 
at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia can be found at 
the end of this email. 

This month, PLUG welcomes back Dr. Walt Mankowski, who will be
giving a talk entitled "A Punch Card Ate My Program".  Walt has
previously given versions of this talk at PLUG West, PLUG North,
and FOSSCON.

  Abstract: 

  COBOL is the Rodney Dangerfield of programming languages —
  it doesn’t get any respect. COBOL is routinely denigrated
  for its verbosity and dismissed as archaic, and for good
  reason: COBOL bears little to no resemblance to modern
  programming languages.  Yet COBOL is far from a dead
  language. It processes an estimated 85% of all business
  transactions, and 5 billion lines of new COBOL code are
  written every year!

  In previous talks, I argued that COBOL isn’t such a bad
  language. In this talk, we’ll journey deep into the past to
  recreate a retro bug that could only happen in COBOL! Our
  travels will include:

    syntactic white space!
    scotch tape!
    dueling compiler options!
    virtual punch cards!
    sentences!
    code blocks!
    periods!

  No punch cards were harmed in the creation of this talk.
  
  Bio: 

    Walt Mankowski is a recovering ivory tower computer scientist
    who recently completed a postdoc working with biologists to
    process and visualize terabytes of 2D and 3D time lapse
    microscope images. In his past life he spent 10 years as a COBOL
    programmer at a major cable home shopping network. He enjoys
    Perl, regular expressions, high-performance computing, and
    Futurama.

  University of the Sciences in Philadelphia (USP) 
  Griffith Hall (Room "C" or "A", look for the signs) 
  600 South 43rd Street 
  Philadelphia, PA 19104-4495 

USP is located in University City. Driving directions are
available at http://www.phillylinux.org/locations/usp.html, or
http://www.usip.edu/directions, both of which have an aerial view
of the campus buildings. USP is also easily accessible by public
transportation. 

For those attending PLUG Central, if you arrive and the doors are
locked you can call UCS's public safety number at 215.895.1117
and they will radio personnel in the guard booth or someone else
to unlock the door.  If you are asked who is sponsoring the
meeting you can say "Zhiwei Liu" in the Chemistry department.

There will be an open Question & Answer session at 7PM, prior to 
the main presentation at 8PM. This is an open meeting; all are 
welcome and encouraged to attend. 

Usually, a number of members get together after the meeting at a 
nearby restaurant for food and perhaps a beer or two. Come join 
the camaraderie! 
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