As long as we're off topic, but interesting - I was born in 1938. MIT had a 704 and punch cards and maybe FORTRAN in the fifties. A classmate wrote FORTH as a portable program for big telescopes.
Programming tools have run off in different directions since then, just as today's tool section in a Big Box is very different from before the baby boom hit the market. Everybody that needs a tool has a good chance of finding what they're looking for, but they'll look for what they've used before or maybe a little better. Y'see, the human brain only weighs three pounds. It hasn't been possible to fit the sum of human knowledge into one brain for one or two hundred years, depending on the capability of the brain. So we have to specialize, and the specialties keep getting narrower. I helped design an industrial process control system in the eighties. One architect couldn't do it - it took one for hardware (Motorola 68K), one for programming (Unix), and one for process control (me, with 20 years of industrial control experience). It was a grand educational experience. So when someone says that this or that tool is absolutely useless, I take that as a sign of narrow specialization, in the dark about the rest of the world but egocentrically sure the rest of the world must be like them. It's a law of human nature, like "The prospect of wealth motivates deceit." Today's politicians seem unable to suppress that motivation. Veering back towards the list topic, I found this in "Four Laws that Drive the Universe" by Peter Atkins (it's about thermodynamics): "Energy is conserved because time is uniform: time flows steadily, it does not bunch up and run faster then spread out and run slowly. ... If time were to bunch up and spread out, then energy would not be conserved." But maybe uniform time is only a local effect, on the scale of the Universe. As far as we know, conservation of energy is not violated, so we have to find the causes of observed time variations in the hardware we've built or the programs we've written. Wait, what about Einstein's relativity? The flow of time is still uniform in a manner that can be predicted from the equations. Bill Hawkins -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of wje Sent: Saturday, August 16, 2008 11:10 AM To: Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement Subject: Re: [time-nuts] I want a good micro-controller You certainly don't need formal training to be a good programmer; I've seen plenty of code from CS grads that's terrible, and very nice code from art majors. In my book, a good program is one one that's organized logically, well documented, and performs the job it was designed to do. A good programmer is someone that produces such programs. That's it. The problem is that, with the advent PCs and easily-accessible programming tools, everyone thinks they can write code, and many can't. Then what you end up with is a tangled mess that's unmaintainable and indecipherable. It's interesting that any number of EE's will take great care in circuit design, but then throw together some poorly-designed code to run their beautiful circuit. But, this has been endemic in the hardware industry for as long as I've been around. Hardware companies frequently have the attitude that it's the hardware that's important and the software is just one of those minor bits that has to get tacked on. This was true even for some companies that should have known better; there were plenty of HW engineers I ran into back in the old Digital days that, even though they were building minicomputers, really considered software an unfortunate requirement that had to be shipped with their beautiful hardware. Ah well, this is really wandering off-topic and my blood pressure's going up. I think I'll go write some C code for an 8-bit micro to calm down. And yes, I use vi. :) Bill Ezell ---------- They said 'Windows or better' so I used Linux. Scott Newell wrote: At 07:36 AM 8/16/2008, wje wrote: I have both EE and CS degrees, and I work in both worlds. In my humble (but completely accurate and stable) opinion, Basic is not a programming language. It's a tool of Satan designed to convince people that they are programmers when they really should stick to their janitorial duties. This is a subset of the general problem that everyone thinks they are programmers, and usually think their code is perfect. But, that's a rant for a different audience. So, how do you tell if you're not a programmer, but pretending to be one? My code is far from perfect, but it can usually be made to get the job done. I try not to cut too many corners, and the ones that I do cut bother me. But when you're the lone programmer on projects, it's hard to know if you're crummy or decent, since there's no one to measure against. (Of course, there's the metric of 'product shipped, product works, bossman happy, paycheck cashed', but that doesn't distinguish between good and bad programmers, just programmers that can fool others along with themselves.) _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there. _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
