On Wed, June 1, 2005 12:15 pm, Simon Chappell said: > Back when I was a young programmer we used to have to think. THINK!
Hey, I'm the resident bemoaner of how rough we used to have it! How dare you take my job?!? :) LOL > Oh > the humanity. No patterns for us. Just endless cups of tea, a pad of > paper (or the back of long listings on greenbar) and your flowchart > stencil. Stencils?!? I laugh at your stencils! It was only freehand drawings for us, and that was when we took the time to actually PLAN anything! > We had it rough I tell you, but I think that we wrote better > code back in those days. And those of us that came through them, still > have a tendency to do so. I have said on numerous occassions that programmers that have never touched Assembly are, with few exceptions, not as good. And although the overall tone of my reply here is a joking one, this is a point I am serious about. I have actually rejected resumes because they had no Assembly experience. I'm not saying you have to be able to hand-code a 3D game engine, but at least have had some exposure. I spent a number of years doing absolutely nothing BUT Assembly, and while I honestly haven't done anything beyond some very simple subfunctions in the past 5-7 years or so, I wouldn't trade that experience for all the algorithm classes and patterns knowledge in the world. There is NOTHING like understanding, at least at a conceptual level, what's going on down there in the lower layers of your machine. Assembly gives you this. Like I said, there are exceptions to this rule, but I haven't met too many. > My first computer had 1K, yes, that's 1024 bytes. Timex Sinclair 1000 by any chance? I loved that little thing! So much so that I spend $200 on one off eBay last year (three of them actually, with a lot of extras). The best thing about it was that if you could manage anything decent on it you were learning... I crammed the entire catalog of movie times for a week for Long Island in it... invented my own rudimentary compression scheme (although I had no clue what "compression" or "algorithms" were back then... never even heard the words... I was like 9 or so!). And I didn't have the 16K expansion module because my dad tried to solder it on because we could never get a good contact, but he fried it in the process, so I was stuck with the 1K (actually, now that I think about it, it might have been 2K. I'm not sure). > We can only hope. Perhaps the prophesied return of Lisp will finally > happen and people will discover REAL programming, not this Teach > Yourself The Latest Junk in 24 Hours stuff. Real, worthwhile, > programming is hard, so if your going to do it, study for it, and > learn (LEARN I say) to do it well. I}}}}}hate}}}}}}}}}}}LISP}}}}}}}}}}}}. LISP... ugh. I can't stand any language that contains more parenthesis per 1,000 lines of code than ACTUAL CODE! :) >> Well done, Craig, with restrospect. A simpler designed framework >> like Struts is exactly the example, the proof, which Simon espouses >> above. > > Yes. Yes. Yes. Thank you Craig. I agree... There are probably architecural decisions in Struts I could complain about, but I think it would quickly become nothing but nitpicking. Craig did a rather good job IMHO of straddling the line between a good architecure that is flexible and extensible without making it too complex. Good job indeed, thank you! Frank --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
