On 23/06/2007, at 9:56 PM, Mark Greenaway wrote:
On 23/06/2007, at 9:37 PM, Jeff Waugh wrote:
Well, it looks like you're doing pretty well as a pure
mathematician, but I
think you have some study left to do, because I still run into the
practical
application of Pythagoras every now and then.
There I go trying to be intelligible again ;) That was the least
excluding example I could think of.
Perhaps if you had compared it
to something more obtuse (girly giggle), such as differential
geometry, you
might have pulled off that delightfully cantankerous pure
mathematician air.
Keep it up!
You know, I'm really trying hard not to become cantankerous. My
motto is "Proofs with a smile".
Getting back to the subject for a second, I worked as a programmer
for nearly a decade, and there was only one time when I wished I'd
known some more compiler theory. The linked article's summary that
said in part "If you don't know how compilers work, then you don't
know how computers work" seems to me far too strong a statement.
To an extent it's true, but it's not a particularly valuable piece of
information. You can list any number of hardware or software
components and then say that if you don't understand just one, then
you don't understand how computers work.
If you don't take compilers then you run the risk of forever
being on the programmer B-list: the kind of eager young architect
who becomes a saturnine old architect who spends a career
building large systems and being damned proud of it.
Large Systems Suck
This rule is 100% transitive. If you build one, you suck.
I thought those few lines revealed more than the rest of the article.
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