On Fri, Jun 5, 2015 at 11:07 AM, Stephen Chrzanowski <pontiac76 at gmail.com>
wrote:
> First, who said that you had to keep all 6 sets of languages in your head
> at once? I've never been told that, and I've been doing software
> development since I was 8, taken several training courses in elementary,
> high school, college, and while employed by three different companies (At
> different times). I don't know VB6 all that well today, but, if I could
> find my CDs and install I'm sure I'd be able to figure out sprintf doesn't
> work. I've got a lot of junk in my head going back to Vic-20 Assembly, to
> V2 Basic, to VB3->6, to Borland Pascal 3 to Delphi 2010, to PHP, to bash,
> to freak'n nearly anything else dealing with web and internet
> technologies. It ain't all going to fit up in my nogin, but sure know
> where to get the info when I need it. php.net is my friend when I need to
> look up how strpos, substr and str_replace work several times an hour.
>
> Second... Come on... Really? This "switching...requires a lot of effort"
> comment is a pretty weak sauce excuse coming from any developer and is
>
{snipped}
This is a lot of commentary for an informal off the cuff remark. :) I mean,
I agree with what you're saying, but I also agree with Simon. Here's why:
I also have lots of mental state cruft that has accumulated in my noggin
over the past 30+ years, going back to a Commodore Pet at my school. Back
in the day, you could comfortably hold the entire state of the system in
your head, your program was a single tasking single user beast that took
over the entire computer, a team of one could easily write many types of
software, you used one language for the entire project, and data stores
were so small, and memory so constrained that you didn't use mega-flexible
systems like those based on SQL (whether embedded like SQLite or not). Of
course, there was no SQLite to use, or even SQL...
Today one person can't hope to keep the entire state of a system, has to
play well with others (as in your program won't have exclusive use of the
hardware in 99.999% of cases *and* must often be able to work in a team
environment where tasks are delegated so that things can be done in a
reasonable amount of time), must work with a variety of technologies &
languages that don't always play nice together (which complicates
debugging), and etc.
Task switching involves overhead, whether it is in a computer or in our
brains.
Sometimes I miss the simplicity of programming my Commodore 8-bit
computers. The rest of the time I love the world we live in where I have
far more computing power in my shirt pocket than I could have ever imagined
back in the day.
SDR
