1 Oct
2024
1 Oct
'24
9:20 p.m.
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(a)makerlisp.com> wrote:
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
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.