11 Apr
2011
11 Apr
'11
4:01 p.m.
>> "Nobody programs in assembly language
anymore,
>> nor ever will again." -(Clancy and Harvey, UC Berkeley Lower Division
>> CS)
> ...and sadly, nobody knows how a computer works,
nor cares.
On Mon, 11 Apr 2011, Dave McGuire wrote:
You do, I do, lots of people here do. There are
some fields in which
that knowledge is still a requirement. For the rest, we'll just have to
keep teaching people.
I don't think that I can remember ANYTHING else as offensive as Clancy and
Harvey's remarks.
There were a few other remarks worthy of note in the same presentation,
including their assertion that recursion was the only possible way to scan
a multi-dimensional array, that SCHEME (a LISP variant) was the only
language in which that particular problem example COULD BE solved, and
their LIE that the UC Berkeley catalog had been rewritten "about 5 years
ago" to reflect their "new" model of lower division CS. (when confronted
with the current catalog, they asserted that it was a "throwback glitch";
they ceased responding when I presented copies of the previous 5 years of
catalogs.) They took long enough to type in their code of their SCHEME
"only possible language" solution for me to write C, FORTRAN, BASIC, and
half of the PROCEDURE DIVISION of COBOL. C'mon guys, scanning all
elements of a multi-dimensional array is NOT more than trivial.
I guess that recursion is another "EVERYBODY DOES/DOESN'T"
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com
I suppose it was inevitable.
Well, if
you're a defeatist, yes. ;)