On Mon, 2011-12-19 at 14:39 -0800, Walter Bright wrote: > On 12/19/2011 1:35 PM, bearophile wrote: > > Given the amount of time it takes to punch the cards, waiting for your turn > > to run the program, and reading the printouts, I think punchcards also teach > > you to use your brain first and to think before doing/trying things, instead > > of going by trial and error. Trial and error is an efficient strategy only > > if > > you have interactive tools that speedup the cycle and the problems to solve > > are not too much hard. > > I've never seen any evidence that punchcards made one a better programmer. > For > sure, one wrote far fewer programs, and infinitely shorter ones, with > punchcards, and so simply lack of experience would make one worse. > > As a programmer who initially learned with punchcards, using an interactive > tty > is far, far, FAR more productive.
Definitely. There were techniques and skills for working at the time, but these have long since passed away into unecessariness. The past has a lot to teach (cf. actors, dataflow, CSP, etc.) but we need to be selective so as to avoid too much "rose coloured spectacles" effect. > And using a full screen editor is another HUGE jump in productivity. Ditto > for > going to big screens and multiple windows. cards < teletype < monitor terminal < windowing system > There are many things I miss about the olden days of programming, but > punchcards, paper tape, and ASR-33 teletypes are not among them. While I'm at > it, cassette tapes, floppies and modems I always hated and am glad to be done > with. Indeed. -- Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder t: +44 20 7585 2200 voip: sip:russel.win...@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road m: +44 7770 465 077 xmpp: rus...@russel.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK w: www.russel.org.uk skype: russel_winder
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