25 Mar
2005
25 Mar
'05
7:06 p.m.
On Fri, 25 Mar 2005, Fred Cisin wrote:
They demo'd an example that "can not possibly
be solved in ANY way
but recursion". While they were keying it in in Scheme, I wrote
out a non-recursive solution (with a 2D array) in C, BASIC, FORTRAN,
and I got halfway through writing the COBOL form.
That's because youre a real programmer and understand what a
computer is. None of our (actually very smart and some even
experienced) grad students actually know what a computer is. I
don't think hardly anyone does.
We had a little robotics project, a bunch of little controllers
that take commands from a big host, and they wanted to write it
all in Java, threading, tasks, etc.
I showed the programmer how to do non-blocking parallel tasks
(serial command string <header ID command args cksum> and a PWM
task driving pneumatic actuators) using a simple one-byte state
variable and a dispatch table. They'd absolutely never heard of
such a thing. We did this in a PIC.
The lightbulb went on in the programmer kid's head -- on an
unrelated project he used the state variable thing in a c++ prog
and got his program done faster and it ran faster than all the
threaded junk with interprocess communications. Well duh.