Anton Aylward wrote:
On 12/29/2016 03:38 AM, Wols Lists wrote:
On 27/12/16 03:21, L A Walsh wrote:
It's not a new idea. SGI did it 15-20 years ago, and dynamic GUI configuration was done based on available features on **Plato** back in the 70's!
Do we ever learn? A large number of today's programmers didn't come out of a Computer Science curriculum and were self taught. While they know the most important and most needed stuff to stay employed, they usually don't care about "history" and thus are doomed to repeat mistakes and problems solved 40-50 years ago. :-(
Well, yes, and no. Some of them deal with fantastic algorithms that CompSci courses would never teach (and perhaps even first year university maths courses wouldn't either). ...
They may not know Knuth and yes, many of their problems could be simplified with a state machine or the 'swiss army knife' of a good parser (say a minimal one generated by Bison ... sorry, Yacc) but they didn't grow up with *NIX and regular expressions. But hey, do CompSci courses do that?
If you are in a Computer Science curriculum, and not taking Computer Science 101. A first or pre-edition of the "Dragon book" was a textbook in a 200-level compiler course... Some of the courses are 300 and 400 level courses with some being foundational for masters and Ph.D work (at least at U. of Illinois, where they had (have?) 2 different CS degrees: one in engineering (where I went), and one in the math/liberal arts school. In the late 70's they had a networked campus and a nationally networked learning network (Plato), that was created and based there on CDC mainframes. Now they have the supercomputer center and who knows what else. The graduate students were all on networked unix (in the late 70s!) while the undergrads did things mostly on mainframes and in the ethernet networked "micro lab" of Z80's.
Many compiler designers are more savvy about what works in parsers and code geenrators that is ever taught in CompSci. BTDT.
--- Depends on the School and curriculum.
A lot of yester-year's programmers didn't come out of a Comp-Sci course either - my first boss was a Maths graduate (I don't think they had Comp-Sci back then :-). I'm a Science graduate.
--- Everyone in Engineering and Science pretty much came out of fields that didn't exist 50-100 years ago...
And a lot of this is really 'engineering' which is about getting things done (see the 'pick two out of three' version) now rather than being mathematically perfect and having the absolutely optimal algorithms 'correctly' coded. "First to market', 'budget', 'customer acceptance': things that like that.
--- Which is why programs have lots of bugs and security is non-existent.
The we have the whole FOSS movement. As John keeps pointing out, its about the people who decide to take action that are the ones that make the decision.
--- Dictators are like that, as was Paul in the Christian Bible, who wrote much of the new testament and changed Christianity's direction forever. WWII-war-leaders were famous for taking action -- often with popular support in their nations. While there are examples of those who just "did things" like early unix inventors, the examples of negative outcomes seem to be more visible than positive outcomes.
The problem there is that the definition of "computer adapted" keeps on changing, and people can't adapt that fast :-(
here endeth the follow-on rant :-)
You think so?
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