Author Shlomi Harif – Home

A IT SR-52 calculator and it’s magnetic program storage card

The BASIC computer language turned fifty today. It was the second non-human language I learned, after Texas Instrument’s SR-52 programming “language” (read: keystrokes). The last paragraph in the SR-52’s manual said something like: “…If you want to learn more about programming, look for a book on BASIC.”

The visceral thrill I felt when I finished a 4-player Monopoly® game on the SR-52. 3½ hour games were now brisk 45 minute ones. No calculating 10% luxury tax, no shuffling around making change for paying rent. Bing, bang, done.

Boring.

The next thing I learned from programming was that just because something is made easier doesn’t make it better. The stodgy details of the board game turned into a boring set of whizzing shoes, dogs and flatirons. Sure, the game only lasted 45 minutes: but it was devoid of the social interactions.

Now it’s 38 years later and I’m still learning, still exploring. I’m not a perfect programmer, and I’m not a mathematician programmer. I see programming as a kind of poetry: governed by rules as stringent as the iambic pentameter and rhyming forms of a Shakespearean sonnet.

Languages change over time and yet remain the same: BASIC, COBOL, FORTRAN, PL/1, TECO gave way to C++, Java, Ruby, lua, and their ilk. More words, a more complex syntax. The nuanced idea that statements create functions which can endlessly aggregate into larger and still more powerful programs.

Haiku to verse to story to novella to epic. To volumes of functional poetry that powers our social, electronic world.

I’m the child of Holocaust survivors. One of my closest family friends is dying (at 95), and my mother, an Auschwitz survivor, is in a sessile state with Alzheimer’s. That leaves me as the “elder generation” person. Which freaks this 54-year-old out. If I found a true “SS” member I’d kill him: only he’d be 90+ years old, so what’s the point:

I learned a lot about the concentric levels of evil, where “governments” pulled the noose tighter and tighter.

The Russians decided to use the bogey monster of “the Jews are selected” in their latest Psy Ops against the Ukraine.

Don’t get me wrong: I’d dance at the party to burn all the Ukraine SS that not only cheerfully joined the Nazis but performed all manner of independent cruelties while their victims were alive. But the Ukrainians of today ARE NOT the Ukrainians of WW II. And Putin, dictator of Russia, is making cynical use of that trope. And in that we are reminded not to jump to action, but to guard the memory of all those Ukrainians who did NOT Participate. All those Ukrainians who are more interested in the hatred and nonsense of

We are NOT the Jews of 1939. We are the Jews of the new century. We are the Jews of Now. The Jews of Understanding. Passover is the holiday Putin’s evil minions and absurd statement attempt to cover. And we are the Jews of We Will Not Bow.

My Ukrainian tribe-mates use Twitter and Facebook and all manner of social media. They stood at the barricades in Kiev and stand with the idea that the people, not the corrupt kleptocrats of the Ukraine and the rulers of Russia, . We, as they say “are not amused.”

It will take more than trying to pit Ukrainian against Ukrainian. Putin’s going to do it the hard way.

And the Jews of the World, despite all the time we’re spending on “running the global markets,” are just trying to stay alive.

But if you _really_ want to be honorable, and have guts, please, oh please, show yourself. American and non-psychotic countries would be happy to relieve you of your burden of life.