4 Sep
2012
4 Sep
'12
6:07 a.m.
Joachim writes:
> The R? has gotten a mixed reception 'round here
Al writes:
The problem I see with the Cambridge examples is
students don't LEARN anything
about what they're programming on. They're given a bunch of magic recipes and
don't learn what they're for. What you end up with is what you
could have done with 10 lines of Z80 assembly talking to a terminal through a
UART, but in the example you have to make your own terminal, talking to a big
blob of USB stack and graphics coprocessor glue.
It's ironic that it seems increasingly hard to do anything "bare metal"
without a graphical UI IDE on a desktop and a USB stack on the "bare metal".
I ran across this (probably inadvertent, possibly sly, but still funny and relevant) quote
on Wikipedia:
"By the late 1960s change was coming: as operating systems and programming
language compilers evolved, software production costs were dramatically increasing."