High Plains Thumper <highplainsthumper@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
> Homer wrote:
>> Verily I say unto thee, that High Plains Thumper spake thusly:
>>
>>> It may be old school, but one does not need a special
>>> software development application to program, if they learn
>>> old school techniques. With proper technique, it does not
>>> matter what code is used, assembly, C, FORTRAN, ALGOL,
>>> BASIC, COBOL, FORTH, PL1, RPG, and etc. Coding is
>>> technician work.
>>
>> As I've said before, for most of my first year at Uni, I
>> didn't even /touch/ a computer, except for the end of week SML
>> assignment, which took all of five minutes to copy from my
>> jotter, and test before printing. I spent most of my lab time
>> goofing off (i.e. hacking Kerberos auth tickets to make it
>> seem like my popup Zephyr massages on other workstations were
>> coming from the department head).
>>
>> I've always found that trying to actually /learn/ by sitting
>> in front of a computer is just a distraction, even back in the
>> days before WWW. I can't imagine that /children/ learn any
>> faster or better in front of a PC than by listening to a
>> teacher and doing written assignments. Certainly all my
>> anecdotal evidence points to that being the case.
>>
>> Learning is about understanding /principles/, not application.
>>
>>> Seems that schools are turning out script kiddies
>>
>> I doubt that any of them even know what a script is. Their
>> definition of "programming" probably involves big shiny
>> buttons and a rodent.
>
> Sounds like you had a good software programming foundation to
> build the rest of your career on.
>
> Computer is nothing more than a power tool. If one doesn't
> understand principle, it serves them no more usefulness than a
> desktop paperweight.
This is really the point I was at. We should be teaching that idea that
a computer is a tool at primary education, with perhaps a little "this
is the internet" and so on, and "these are the kinds of interfaces you
find". General stuff, with plenty of real examples, and then maybe iced
with "how to put it all together".
One of the most important things is for children to understand that
their phone is a computer, their game console is a computer, their TV is
(probably) a computer, even their washing machine is probably controlled
by a computer, their family car-engine is probably managed by a computer
and so on.
Recent Becta activity seems to have reduced it all to learning Word,
Powerpoint and so on, which by the time these kids are in a real job,
will be part of history, just like the Commodore PET, Dragon32 and
Honeywell mainframes around my (secondary) school.
Secondary education should look more at what's in a computer (processor,
storage, i/o) and maybe look at simple programming tools, and an
introduction to programming. At that stage, it could be as useful to
binary-input machine code into a Z80-based machine as anything else, at
least to get a real feel for how the damn thing really works!
<snip fortran example>
>>
>> Although I rarely attended any, I still remember the Demo
>> Scene parties in the 80's (still going strong today), where
>> coders produced the most amazing demos in just 4k of RAM. Pity
>> the Vole seems to hire the afore -mentioned Visual Basic
>> "receptionists" instead of ex-sceners, otherwise they might
>> not produce so much Bloatware.
I think that the focus in Microsoft has been almost entirely on gloss
and not on underlying architectures, in fact, the desire to embed IE
into the OS, as an example, has lead to a tortured mess which has become
unsustainable. Microsoft might well have recruited some brilliant
coders, but they've been ill-used, I suspect.
>>
>>> This is one of the reasons why Linux is much more efficient
>>> at tasks than Windows. At 2 MB, Beryl is a good example of
>>> efficient 3D desktop work.
>>
>> It does highlight one of the more pronounced technical
>> differences between the Linux and Windows development
>> methodologies, ostensibly at least.
>
> I was able to speed up data acquisition channel scanning from
> 50,000 to 130,000 aggregate channels per second on this 2 MIP
> minicomputer with 2 MB RAM, by careful use of embedded assembly
> to replace FORTRAN library calls in the scan loop and breaking
> out the tape write routine as a separate task trap triggered by
> queued intertask communications.
>
> Accorded, I doubt but only a few Windows developers know about
> assembly language (or how to optimally use low level programming
> languages like "C". One can create *bloat* with any programming
> language.)
>
Assembly is worth knowing about, but it really does then need some
knowledge about compilers and how they make function calls and so on.
Writing assembly is not quick, though...
--
| mark at ellandroad dot demon dot co dot uk |
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