On a related note I met up with a colleague from the place where I used to do the C++ coding and it was good to catch up with him and hear what had happened to everybody. Sometimes I wonder if I could go back there and use the knowledge I have acquired since leaving to update the software. I would love to be able to incorporate a scripting language like TCL or Python into the main application and use scripts to drive it. The application was for controlling a high performance mass spectrometer and I actually wrote a sort of scripting language to provide some high level control of the sample introduction and data measurements. It was horrendously complex under the hood and was also multi threaded which meant that not many people could work out how to use it. With hindsight it didn’t need to be multi-threaded except in maybe one or two cases and even these could be handled by a single threaded script.

Who knows…may be one day I’ll get to do it. Until then I’ll keep the brain ticking over trying to remember ‘A’ level maths.