On Mar 4, 2006, at 5:55 AM, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
> On Fri, 3 Mar 2006 22:05:19 -0500, David Treadwell
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> declaimed the following in
> comp.lang.python:
>
>
>> My ability to think of data structures was stunted BECAUSE of
>> Fortran and BASIC. It's very difficult for me to give up my bottom-up
>> programming style, even though I write better, clearer and more
>> useful code when I write top-down.
>>
>>
IIRC, during 1984, my senior year, BYTE magazine had a cover story on
OOP. (OH, how I loved the cover art back in the day!) My impression
after reading the article: WTF is that for? Every class I had which
needed programming, be it CS or chemical engineering, taught it in a
very linear, bottom-up fashion. First you read inputs, then do Foo,
then do Bar, then do (fill in your favorite third-level word).
It was even worse in the chemistry department. No chem major (other
than myself, as I also was a chem eng major) had _any_ computer
courses beyond the required Fortran 101. It was a struggle to get any
chemistry student to do anything that required using LINPAC,
Mathematical Recipes code or a plotting program.
This level of absurdity reached its apex during grad skewl when I
wrote a monolithic 30-page program in MS QuickBasic for Mac to
simulate NMR spectra. No one else was ever able to understand how to
use the program.
Even worse, that 30-page program disappeared the day Mac System 7.0
was installed. The byte-compiled basic code became unreadable because
System 7 permanently broke QuickBasic.
The last program I wrote for anyone else's use was written in VBA/
Excel. I hated every minute of it, but the request was made because
everyone has Excel, and nobody wanted to install Python. VBA has at
least 3 API's running simultaneously (Excel, VBA-classic and VBA-
pseudoOOP). Now that I know Py2App, that dragon has been slain.
Which brings me to my last point: Why be beholden to the graces of a
single-source supplier of a language or OS? Proprietary systems will
always become either (a) extinct or (b) so crammed with legacy code
they become unreliable.
I still don't get OOP completely, but Python has helped a great deal.
> FORTRAN was quite amenable to "top-down" design (which was barely
> taught during my senior year: 1980; and I'm a CS major -- you don't
> want
> to see the text used for the "systems analysis" class; I don't recall
> ever seeing a "requirement document" created in the entire text...)
>
> I've done lots of FORTRAN stuff where the main program was
> interchangeable...
>
> program main
> ...
> call Initialize()
> call Process()
> call CleanUp()
> stop
> end
>
Sure. It seems logical now. But remember, I learned WatFiv Fortran,
which came before even Fortran 77. I saw my first Fortran 95 code
about two years ago. It took me a while to realize that what I was
looking at _was_ Fortran!
>> 3. I demand a general-purpose toolkit, not a gold-plated screwdriver.
>>
>
> Would a gold-plated sonic screwdriver work? <G> {Let's see how many
> catch that reference}
>
Google makes this game too easy, but it's to Who you refer. How about
_this_ reference: "What we all need is a left-handed monkey wrench."
<grin>
:--David
--
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
