Each generation bemoans the qualities of following generations.
(Perhaps justifiably in this case, but we're acting out a stereotyped
pattern.)

Having a mental model of a computer is a good idea, but I'd rather not
have to teach the details of PDP-11 condition codes (which changed in
unexpected ways over time) Now caches loom large, and should such a
course provide a mental model of smart phones? [I think it should, and
the course should cover secure boot, but that leaves lots less time
for assembly language.]

On Tue, Oct 1, 2024 at 11:20 AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Oct 01, 2024 at 10:56:13AM -0400, Dan Cross wrote:
> > On Tue, Oct 1, 2024 at 10:32???AM Luther Johnson
> > <luther.johnson@makerlisp.com> wrote:
> > > I think because the of the orders of magnitude increase in the demand
> > > for programmers, we now have a very large number of programmers with
> > > little or no math and science (and computer science doesn't count in the
> > > point I'm trying to make here, if that's your only science, you're not
> > > going to have the models in your head from other disciplines to give you
> > > useful analogs) background, and that's a big change from 40 years ago.
> > > So that has had an effect on who is programming, how they think about
> > > it, and how languages have been marketed to that programming audience. IMHO.
> >
> > I've found a grounding in mathematics useful for programming, but
> > beyond some knowledge of the physical constraints that the universe
> > places on us and a very healthy appreciation for the scientific
> > method, I'm having a hard time understanding how the hard sciences
> > would help out too much. Electrical engineering seems like it would be
> > more useful, than, say, chemistry or geology.
> >
> > I talk to a lot of academics, and I think they see the situation
> > differently than is presented here. In a nutshell, the way a lot of
> > them look at it, the amount of computer science in the world increases
> > constantly while the amount of time they have to teach that to
> > undergraduates remains fixed. As a result, they have to pick and
> > choose what they teach very, very carefully, balancing a number of
> > criteria as they do so. What this translates to in the real world
> > isn't that the bar is lowered, but that the bar is different.
>
> I really wish that they made students take something like the PDP-11
> assembly class - it was really systems architecture, you learned the
> basic idea of a computer: a CPU, a bus to talk to memory, a bus to
> talk to I/O, how a stack works, ideally how a context switch works
> though that kinda blows minds (I personally don't think you are a
> kernel programmer if you haven't implemented swtch() or at least
> walked the code and understood all of it).
>
> I did all that and developed a mental model of all computers that
> has helped me over the last 4 decades.  Yes, my model is overly
> simplistic but it still works, even on the x86 craziness.  I don't
> know how you could get to that mental model with x86, x86 is too
> weird.  I don't really know which architecture is close to the
> simplicity of a PDP-11 today.  Anyone?
>
> If I were teaching it, I'd just get a PDP-11 simulator and teach
> on that.   Maybe.
> --
> ---
> Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat