1 Oct
2024
1 Oct
'24
8:25 p.m.
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.
On 10/01/2024 07:01 AM, Larry McVoy wrote:
On Tue, Oct 01, 2024 at 07:47:10AM -0600,
arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
Funny, I've come to the same conclusion, both
in programming and my
retirement hobby. There is always someone way better than me, but
you are correct, that doesn't mean I'm awful. Just have more to
learn.
A buddy pointed out that I was probably better than 80% of the people
leaving the dock, it's just I fish with a guy who is better than pretty
much everyone.
As a guy in his 2nd
retirement (1st didn't stick) I can tell you I am
so happy not having to deal with work stuff. My buddies who are still
working tell me stories I find difficult to believe. They all say I'm
so politically incorrect that I wouldn't last a week in today's world.
If their stories are true, yeah, that's not for me.
Weird politics and crappy programmers, count me out.
Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
None of those ring a bell
so
On Tue, Oct 01, 2024 at 07:13:04AM -0600,
arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
Did
you do generics? That and the run time, which had some real-time
bits to it (*IIRC*, it's been a long time), as well as the cross
object code type checking, would have been real bears. Would the word have been better off if Ada had
caught on everywhere?
Probably. When I was in grad school studying language design, circa 1982,
it was expected to do so. But the language was VERY challenging for
compiler writers.
Huh. Rob Netzer and I, as grad students, took cs701 and cs702
at UW Madison.
It was the compilers course (701) and the really hard compilers course (702)
at the time. The first course was to write a compiler for a subset of Ada
and the second on increased the subset to be almost complete.
We were supposed to do it on an IBM mainframe because the professor had his
own version of lex/yacc there. Rob had a 3b1 and asked if we could do it
there if he rewrote the parser stuff. Prof said sure.
In one semester we had a compiler, no optimizer and not much in the
way of graceful error handling, but it compiled stuff that ran. We did
all of Ada other than late binding of variables (I think that was Ada's
templates) and threads and probably some other stuff I don't remember. Like many things, the first 90% is easy, the
second 90% is hard. :-)
I guess we did the easy stuff :-(
I
don't consider myself to be that good of a programmer, I can point to
dozens of people my age that can run circles around me and I'm sure there
are many more.
You are undoubtedly better than you give yourself credit for, even
if there were people who could run circles around you. I learned
a long time ago, that no matter how good you are, there's always
someone better than you at something. I decided long ago to not
try to compete with Superman. But
apparently the bar is pretty low these days and I agree, that's sad.
And it
makes it much less fun to be out in the working world. :-(