Talk:City & Guilds Mnemonic Code

A fact from City & Guilds Mnemonic Code appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 19 February 2023 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that the City and Guilds of London Institute developed the City & Guilds Computer virtual machine as part of their 1960s teaching materials?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2023/February. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/City & Guilds Mnemonic Code.

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Did you know nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Cielquiparle (talk) 12:11, 9 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

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... that the City and Guilds of London Institute developed the City & Guilds Computer virtual machine as part of their 1960s teaching materials? Source: Herbert and ICL
ALT1: ... that the City & Guilds Mnemonic Code was developed by the City and Guilds of London Institute to teach computing, but one programmer noted its lack of relative addresses was "a major omission and great inconvenience"? Source: Herbert

- Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/Generation Drag ‎

Created by Maury Markowitz (talk). Self-nominated at 19:11, 12 January 2023 (UTC).[reply]

Interesting! This is an institutional environment I'd never heard of. But I have some basic concerns. First, you need to link to the article from a couple of places so that the orphan tag can come off. Second, what is the source for Still in use in the 1980s, its coursework was used around the world. and The system found uses in the UK as well as many of its former colonies;? Some classified pages mentions of training classes targeted to Africa doesn't really support all that. Was it used in Canada, the Caribbean, Australia, or other parts of the Commonwealth? Third, one of your main sources, the Herbert article, says that the assembler didn't offer any form of labels or relative addressing, which meant that any time you added or subtracted anything you had to fix up displacements throughout the rest of the program. That's barely an assembler! No wonder one Herbert calls it "impoverished", says that Mnemonic Code's disappearance from computer history is warranted, and says he feels a bit guilty for resurrecting an environment in which it can be run. Are there any other sources that will gainsay what Herbert is saying? If all this is true, then it was especially bad as an educational vehicle, where iterations of fixing faulty code is a given. But the article doesn't convey any of this. Fourth, I suspect the DYK promoters will not like the hook, since general readers won't know what a virtual machine is. Maybe Herbert's guilty feeling could serve as a hook? Wasted Time R (talk) 20:51, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Wasted Time R: Lots of stuff here, I'll try to order this:

1) Orphans are not an issue for DYK that I am aware of, but I addressed it anyway.

2) Wording changed, I believe the cite now clearly matches the body.

3) I'm not sure the concerns about labels are an issue for DYK. For GA/FA, sure...

4) Added.

Maury Markowitz (talk) 15:53, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding #1, it was my impression that the DYK promoters won't accept an article with a tag at the top. But I could be wrong. In any case, I've also linked to this from the Comparison of assemblers article.

Regarding #2, I've been looking at this further and I think the 1988 West Africa advertisement references to "City & Guilds Computer Programming & Information Processing" are to other introductory course materials in computer programming that the City & Guilds Institute offered at that time and are unrelated to the 1960s Mnemonic Code and Computer. If you look at this Newspapers.com search you will see a slew of advertisements in British papers during the late 1980s through mid 1990s for various different City & Guilds Institute educational and vocational course materials in computers, and I think the West Africa ones are of the same kind. By comparison, this Newspapers.com search that includes 'mnemonic code' only produces mentions from 1965 and 1967 (it might be useful to incorporate those into the article).

Regarding #3, this is not a question of DYK vs GA/FA, this is a question of the DYK criteria "meets core policies and guidelines ... is neutral". Without mentioning some of the acute deficiences of Mnemonic Code, I don't believe the article is sufficiently balanced.

Regarding #4 and ALT1, I'm confused – you've added the Herbert criticism as a hook but not to the article itself? Also, general readers aren't going to know what "relative addresses" are (for that matter, your average programmer nowadays wouldn't know either). I was thinking of a hook more along the lines of someone feeling guilty for resurrecting a 1960s computer programming teaching environment that is so impoverished. Wasted Time R (talk) 13:35, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Wasted Time R:#1 and #2 are addressed, yes?
I didn't like the idea of ALT1, but added it because you seemed to be suggesting that. So I'm just striking it.
As to the rest... you are using terms like "acute" and "so impoverished" but the only mention of this topic is what is clearly an opinion from half a century later. Do you have a contemporary critique that supports these statements? Or even a solid reference along the lines that "any assembler without relative addressing is impoverished"? I'm uncomfortable including the statement other than to the effect of "in the opinion of one programmer", and I'm not sure what that adds to the article and certainly don't see how not mentioning it makes it unbalanced. Maury Markowitz (talk) 19:23, 24 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Maury Markowitz: Okay, we'll go with ALT0. Okay, we'll leave out Herbert's critical assessment. But I still think the article should state, without even commenting on whether it's good or bad, that there were no labels or relative addressing in the assembler nor any provision for comments. Those characteristics are at least as important as the many extensive details you have given; after all, the first sentence of the lede says this is an article about an assembler language, not just an instruction set. Finally, regarding #2, no that is not settled. I think you have parsed the West African advertisement text as "(City & Guilds Computer) (Programming & Information Processing)", but in reality I believe it was "(City & Guilds) (Computer Programming & Information Processing)". As support for my interpretation I point to all those British adverts from the 80s and 90s that were clearly of the form "(City & Guilds) (some kind of instructional material about computers in general)". That the Mnemonic Code would still be being used in computer programming education during the 1980s is a pretty exceptional claim that I think would require a stronger source, one that specifically mentioned "Mnemonic Code" in it, which the West African adverts are not and do not. Wasted Time R (talk) 01:08, 25 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Wasted Time R: Sorry for the tardy reply, for some reason my machine won't stay logged in so I'm only getting notified of direct posts on my talk page. Something to do with cookies I'm sure. In any event, now I see what you were saying with that first part and I have added a bit, see what you think. As to the second, now I see the issue there too, I did not see the snippets until I clicked on them again, previously I only saw the text. Hmmm, I guess that can just be removed, it has no real effect on the article. Maury Markowitz (talk) 17:47, 6 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

No problems on the delay. This is good to go now. Wasted Time R (talk) 22:40, 6 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Maury Markowitz and Wasted Time R: I really want to promote this hook, but I'm worried that to the lay reader, the fact cited in the hook doesn't quite map to the article, which makes it clear that the City & Guilds Mnemonic Code was developed as part of the 1960s teaching materials, but doesn't explicitly state that the associated City & Guilds Computer virtual machine was as well. It's implied, but I think a minor edit or two will make the connection clearer. Cielquiparle (talk) 01:48, 8 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Well the "computer" was a software interpreter for the code. The code could not be run otherwise... there is no physical manifestation of the machine. It would be like saying that we need to be explicit that Java's VM was created to run Java. Perhaps I'm not understanding the concern, but I added a statement. Maury Markowitz (talk) 16:11, 8 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]