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). Some games draw on slamming around quaternions - complex numbers in three dimensions as something that arithmetically easier to deal with though (sometimes very large) matricies and appropriate algorithms than when the first person shooter "swivels his head/pov" than doing by vectors. 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? However there are other programmers who DO study these things, even if they are self taught. many wiki engines, for example, live and die by regular expressions. many compiler designers are more savvy about what works in parsers and code geenrators that is ever taught in CompSci. BTDT.
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.
Many sciences are a lot heavier on maths - maths that does something - than maths or CompSci can be. Science course are always about something tangible and tangible, expressible problems, problems that often need computers to solve or help solve. Be it control of experiments, data capture, statistical analysis. 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. 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.
My first computer was the company mini with 256K ram for an entire office of 20 or more people :-)
*sigh* Monty Python - Four Yorkshiremen - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo But what the heck! Because of local topogrpahy, hill and dale, If I walk along the grid layout of the roads its up hill and down dale and up another hill, so yes, I go anywhere and I end up walking uphill (some of the time) in both directions. And today, it will be in the snow :-) I'm glad I have shoes and feet :-)
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 :-)
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