SemiOT: Mourning for Classic Computing

From: Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner <spc_at_conman.org>
Date: Sun Aug 19 15:43:16 2001

It was thus said that the Great "Fred Cisin (XenoSoft)" once stated:
>
> On Fri, 17 Aug 2001, Chuck McManis wrote:
> > Sounds like Italy (the driving anyway!) I do recall that when I learned to
> > program in Fortran the school had a you send a deck of cards in that they
> > would run and then you would get your results back. It did make you stop
> > and think. Still I have to agree that teachers have a lot more influence
> > than language environment.
>
> Reminds me:
> I had a student in the mid/late 80s, who "obviously didn't have the
> prerequisites". She didn't know what a source file was, what an object,
> nor executable file was, hadn't ever heard of a "compiler" nor a "linker".
> But, it turned out that she had a decent grasp of algorithms. It
> turned out that she had had multiple programming language courses at Cal
> State Hayward, where she had learned the words "deck" and "results".

  In the early 90s I was in a Unix Systems Programming class, with
prerequisites of Data Structures, Compiler Writing (undergrad level) and a
working knowledge of C. In other words, it's an upper level course.

  So the professor was talking about how a program is typically laid out in
memory when it's loaded and running---here's the text segment, here's the
data segment, stack and heap. A student then raises her hand and the
professor calls on her.

  ``Excuse me professor,'' she said. ``But where do the comments go?''

  I've rarely seen the professor's expression on other people, and usually
only when hit upside the head with a 2x4 [1]. It took him a full two
minutes to finally recover and then he went onto a digression about the
compilation process, something that should have sunk in during Compiler
Writing.

> I confronted one of the profs there, and asked him why they didn't at
> least teach their students about compilers. His response: "that's for
> TECHNICIANS and OPERATORS. Computer scientists don't need to know that
> petty stuff."

  Heh. There were a few professors I had like that. One that taught
Software Engineering, hated programming, and his stuff would only work on a
machine that was infinitely fast and had an infinite amount of memory.

> Keep in mind that students don't need to continue to use the language
> that they started with for the rest of their careers!
> If they start with one language and then very early on, switch to another,
> then they have the possibility of NOT developing baby duck syndrome, and
> of haviong a better understanding of how languages work.

  I fortunately learned early on (even before college) that there were
families of similar languages and there are only a few families: procedural
(Fortran, BASIC, C, Pascal, Lisp, Forth), functional (Haskel, ML, /bin/sh
(to a degree), Lisp, Forth), object oriented (which came out of procedural
mostly, Smalltalk, C++, Jaba, Lisp, Forth), assembly (pick your chip) and
Lisp (Lisp, Forth, Postscript). And once you know a few, picking up a new
one is no big deal (okay, what's the syntatic surgar for this one?)

  -spc (And writing portable code is actually easy if you start out
        trying to write portable code ... )
Received on Sun Aug 19 2001 - 15:43:16 BST