The lost art (Was: The VAX is running

Someone on the list (whose attribution wasn't passed on) So. Hmm... as one who has written plenty of embedded application code and firmware (boot ROMs) and quite a bit of user application code for 8-bit, 16-bit, and 32-bit processors for money (and 12-bit processors for fun), all I can say is you must be new. The short answer is one instruction at a time like a composer writes symphonies one note at a time. The overall effect is stunning, even if a single note/single instruction doesn't do much. Perhaps in building the skills to take a real-world problem apart into solvable components and abstract the steps necessary to produce a solution? It's something I see novice programmers struggle with. This comment reminds me of an idea put forth in Rick Cook's "Wizardry" series about a Cupertino programmer summoned to a land of magic and dragons. He, in essence, creates a language and compiler for magic spells. At one point, he describes the difference between himself (as a programmer and a person from a technological world) and the wizards of his new home from the standpoint of how their styles of "magic" are different. The traditional wizards study for years and years to learn a spell _exactly_ because they don't understand every nuance that contributes to the spell working. They see "this tree" or "this blade of grass" and seek to understand just that one instance. They can't generalize into class: tree and instance: this tree. One can learn "a language" or "a computer", but when that language or that vendor or that architecture fades from prominence, it's a lot harder for that person to keep current than learning how "languages" or "computers" work with each different one being an instance of a class. I myself know plenty of compiled languages and plenty of scripted and/or interpreted languages. I don't really worry about learning one more or twenty more. I "grok" the underlying concepts. The specifics are merely window dressing. -ethan