13 Apr
2011
13 Apr
'11
10:57 a.m.
As a student, I was on the tail end of the
keypunch/batch era. It was
painful but one good thing it did was instill the notion of doing the
design and coding correctly up-front, and forcing one to think in
I will most definitely agree that that's a Good Thing.
People who program by saying 'Oh, let's invert that condition and see if
it fixes it, lets make that look run one more time, perhaps there should
be a semicolon here...' produce IMHO unreliable programs. They don't
understnad why they work (not really), and actually, moch of the time
they don't really work.
It's the same IMHO with hardware. I still design the old-fashioned way
with pen and paper. But it is my aim 9and something I achieve most of the
time) for the design to work first time when soldered up. If it doesn't,
then I think before changing anything.
I've seen so-called designers prototyping circuits (or using a CAD
system) and saying things like 'Oh, I'll try inverting the clock to those
flip-flops' or 'I'll try changing that NAND gate to A NOR gate'. Needless
to say they don't really undersntad their own design amd it rarely works
reliably.
-tony