Middleware

The first time I heard the phrase middleware, I was writing software for FedEx with a terrific team of Oracle developers in the late 1990s. I had to ask for a definition. In short, middleware is software that run between two things. Middleware is software that is invisible to the user. Middleware is software but seems to fall outside the accepted definitions of an application or app. It is software’s own software-based infrastructure. Does that make any sense? Probably not.
I wrote my first lines of code on a PDP-11 microcomputer from Digital Electronics Corporation (DEC) during high school. I attended a school in a wealthy area surrounded by the massively burgeoning IT industry.  In my high school, four years before the IBM-PC came to the market, I learned BASIC. The name literally meant “Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code”, and no does not relate to the American slang basic, which seems to be a bit of an insult. 

10 BEGIN 

20 PRINT “HELLO WORLD”

30 END

Hard to imagine how these building blocks gave us the world of modern digital commerce. Those roots go back even farther. That trip requires tipping our hat in honor of Ada Lovelace, Alen Turing.
My educational progression followed the global development of software and software tools. In 1982, heading to university, I bought an IBM-PC for $2,500. That was the discount a university professor got. Adjusted for 2022 dollars, the cost would approximate $7,500. 
As a college first year, I thought I would study computer science. Regrettably, my university’s systems were older than my high school’s systems. No way was I going to learn how to program in assembly language on a huge mainframe computer. Mainframes, in 1982, were already doomed, so I thought. I never wanted to write an operating system, which was one of the capstone assignments. 
I finally took CS-111 as an independent study. In a class by myself, I read Cooper and Clancy’s “Oh Pascal” learning the software language Pascal. That book remains on the shelf behind me in my office today. 
At the age of 28, I had already been a contributing author and technical editor for books about computer programming. Two evenings a week, I stood in front of a group of adults teaching programming skills at a community college. One high school elective and single independent study course for one semester started me on my career. While an autodidact, nearly all I learned fell beyond the reach of classrooms. School never came easily to me, likely because of my learning differences. 
I watch colleagues like Dimitri in awe. In direct comparison, I see that I fraud and the idiot, even today. We’re all like that though, aren’t we? We get good at something, or we get recognition then we tell ourselves: No, I don’t deserve this. From my perspective, he is better skilled that I, smarter than I. I admire he jumps between programming languages and environments.
I mentioned Pascal on purpose, not just as the rambling digression (I do love my digressions though). The programming language I use for work today had been built from Pascal. Oracle, when needing to create a procedural programming language borrowed heavily from Pascal. Pascal is an imperative and procedural programming language, a natural progression for me from BASIC. The language had been designed by Niklaus Wirth. Mr. Wirth, who is 88 years old in 2022, won the Turing Prize in 1984, roughly the same year I learned Pascal. 
Stevie and I write code in Oracle’s PL/SQL language. The language derived from an earlier structured procedural language called Pascal, that I learned at university after learning BASIC in high school. We declare variables at the top of a subroutine. We write code in logical subroutines called procedures or functions. These get compiled by Oracle into the database as something that is no longer intelligible to human readers. These routines / subroutines form building blocks within the