SemiOT: Mourning for Classic Computing

From: Douglas Quebbeman <dhquebbeman_at_theestopinalgroup.com>
Date: Tue Aug 21 15:25:44 2001

> 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."

I worked for a while with a Physics major who'd learned machine-language
programming for the IBM PC using DEBUG.COM. He also had no conception of
source file structure.

After we hired him, he was assigned some programming tasks, and sent off
to do his thing. A few days later, he asked me how to include his code
into the system. I asked him for the file name, and just included his
module in our batch files that did the system build.

Kept getting errors on his module, so I asked him to assemble it and
go through the listing and correct his errors (I hadn't even looked
at it).

"What's an assembler?"

He was keeping multiple, un-related subprograms in a single monolithic
source file, with none of the assembler directives that were needed to
define the program's memory model and segment use. Also, no TITLE, etc
stuff to make it pretty. I took the one subprogram whoes operation I
could fathom, rewrote it to comply with the memory model, added some
other directives, then shot it back to him and told him to either
make each subprogram a separate module or figure out which *should*
be together in the same module (based on data defs, etc). He wouldn't
do it, and instead kept everything together. Then, he'd go through
the extra work of extracting the subprograms, and placing them in
separate source modules... but he'd do this extraction *every* time
he made a set of changes to his huge monolithic source.

I left there in 1990; on a visit back in 1995, I found he was no
longer writing code, but was confined to performing installations.

Thank God!

-dq
Received on Tue Aug 21 2001 - 15:25:44 BST

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