25 Apr
2016
25 Apr
'16
1:50 p.m.
On Mon, 4/25/16, Swift Griggs <swiftgriggs at gmail.com> wrote:
So, the point is that the masses
don't often pick "great" languages to fixate on.? IMHO, Just
because I point that out, doesn't make me "foolish, ignorant, narrow
minded, or short-sighted"
I usually try to stay out of such discussions, but I think it's
important to draw some distinctions here. First, it's not pointing
out which languages/techniques are popular that's narrow-
minded and short-sighted. It's the view that popularity and
"commercial viability" is the primary consideration of value
in education that's narrow-minded and short-sighted. Second,
it's the perspective that's narrow-minded and short-sighted,
not the person who expresses that perspective. Many people
fail to appreciate the distinction between training and education
and as a result see the primary purpose of the university to
be job preparation. That so many people misunderstand the
purpose of the university isn't a reflection on their individual
intelligence or priorities. It's a reflection on the misplaced
priorities of the secondary education system and of society
as a whole. It's the same misplaced priorities that lead so
many students to be so obsessed by the most meaningless
part of the system: grades.
BLS
25 Apr
25 Apr
3:05 p.m.
On Mon, 25 Apr 2016, Brian L. Stuart wrote:
First, it's not pointing out which
languages/techniques are popular that's
narrow- minded and short-sighted.
I get that.
It's the view that popularity and "commercial
viability" is the primary
consideration of value in education that's narrow-minded and
short-sighted.
I know what you are getting at. It's basically an extension of the
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The idea is somewhat that if students learn a
"good" language that'll teach them some meta-structure that will help them
later. Conversely, I've heard folks say that BASIC is the opposite since
the goto statement encourages bad-coding.
Second, it's the perspective that's
narrow-minded and short-sighted, not
the person who expresses that perspective.
I get that too. Then, let me say that the *idea* that I was attacking
Pascal via Oberon rather than the Ivory Tower Academics is ridiculous.
Many people fail to appreciate the distinction between
training and
education and as a result see the primary purpose of the university to
be job preparation.
I completely understand the point you are making. I don't disagree.
Since most folks are too broke to afford it without taking on massive
debt, modern students might be forgiven if the distinction is lost on them
after they emerge with huge debt saddling them. Your point might be
logically valid, but ask a 23 year old if they care when they can't get a
job after giving the uni a quarter million bucks and 4-5 years of time
they spent being "educated" rather than "trained". The underlying
point I
was making is that schools don't always "train" a person ... and that's
what I wanted and actually needed. There weren't any dedicated coding
schools I had access to back then. So, my option was to attend a local
school I could afford or nothing. Much to my chagrin all but one of the
profs had turned off their brains in 1986 and it was the 90's. The only
one of them who could actually teach *or* train me in anything was too
busy managing a ranch (seriously) to spend much time teaching. The rest of
them could barely grade my code.
That so many people misunderstand the purpose of the
university isn't a
reflection on their individual intelligence or priorities. It's a
reflection on the misplaced priorities of the secondary education system
and of society as a whole.
True. I wonder though, do you believe that teaching a language with almost
zero commercial value is justified in the name of education because of
it's superior "meta" qualities ? They couldn't have done both since all
commercially successful languages are just so much trash ? IMHO, one can
teach using just about any Turing-complete language (and yes I've taught
programming classes myself, just not at a University). If the lang sucks
then you can point out what sucks about it and what not to do.
My first language was Logo. It'd have been a lot more helpful at the time
if it was something else. I tossed Logo aside the minute I got a compiler.
99% of the useful design patterns are ones I've learned on my own. As Will
Hunting says, I might have paid $1.50 in late fees to learn what they
taught me in school and been a lot better off, but bereft of the sheepskin
in the end. Then again, I went to two crappy schools that didn't
specialize in CS. I didn't graduate. I dropped out in my 4th year after
the frustration boiled over. So, maybe my personal perspective is just as
personal as those folks who went to MIT and fell in love with LISP, just
different (about $250,000 different, in fact).
It's the same misplaced priorities that lead so
many students to be so
obsessed by the most meaningless part of the system: grades.
Grades aren't meaningless if you have a grant/scholarship to maintain or
need to get into graduate school. They aren't meaningless if you have to
pay tuition and ever class you have to re-take costs you $$$. They have
plenty of meaning to employers like IBM who might not hire you for that
entry-level position with a low GPA. They might not reflect some aspect of
education or learning you think is important, but there is more to going
to uni than just to get a mind expanding education.
I think folks who haven't been to school in 20+ years have a totally
warped view of what is happening nowadays. They are becoming
astronomically expensive and the value they impart is more and more
questionable. The debt trap they participate in is good enough reason for
many students to avoid them altogether and seriously consider "training"
style schools as alternative if you'd like to say, be able get a job via
passing a technical interview when you graduate.
I was coding at a job about six years ago and we wanted to hire a couple
of interns. So, we interviewed about 6 candidates. All our code was in C
or C++ and we found that none of the students from the local universities
had those skills. They were taught (some) Smalltalk and (mostly) Java.
Okay, fine, but the ones I interviewed had very weak critical thinking
skills, and that was the worst part since I could have grudglingly taken
the time to teach them C or C++. I could only attribute that to the
memorize-and-regurgitate culture of the schools, but maybe it was just bad
luck. We ended up hiring a 17 year old kid with GED who made the college
grads look downright pathetic. He was self-taught on cheap home computers.
He knew a few scripting languages we didn't care about but we taught him C
and C++ and he was doing commits about three weeks later. Later on we
hired one of the interns and had to let them go because he didn't
understand that he couldn't skip work like he skipped class and also
couldn't think or code his way out of a wet paper sack.
If I remain dubious of the value of "education" vs "training", just
chalk
it up to my personal experience.
-Swift
3:12 p.m.
On 04/25/2016 10:50 AM, Brian L. Stuart wrote:
I usually try to stay out of such discussions, but I
think it's
important to draw some distinctions here. First, it's not pointing
out which languages/techniques are popular that's narrow-
minded and short-sighted. It's the view that popularity and
"commercial viability" is the primary consideration of value
in education that's narrow-minded and short-sighted.
Exactly to the point! In its day, JOVIAL was a great programming
language, but who the heck knows it today? In 1970, a student taking a
programming languages course would be likely be exposed to COBOL,
FORTRAN, Algol and perhaps PL/I. How many students today are conversant
in those? Those were the big "general-purpose" languages and you'd be
unlikely to find a job not knowing at least two of those.
We ran into that with COBOL and Y2K, which surprised me, since I didn't
think that COBOL had quite gone out of fashion yet in 1998. Back then I
wondered if there were any extant 7080 autocoder applications still
running around (running under emulation) that needed updating.
Times change and it's always best to take the broad view of learning as
many languages as opportunity affords.
Down at the bottom, it's all machine code.
--Chuck
5:14 p.m.
On 4/25/2016 1:12 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 04/25/2016 10:50 AM, Brian L. Stuart wrote:
I suspect IBM 360/370 until the PC BOOM.
I usually try to stay out of such discussions,
but I think it's
important to draw some distinctions here. First, it's not pointing
out which languages/techniques are popular that's narrow-
minded and short-sighted. It's the view that popularity and
"commercial viability" is the primary consideration of value
in education that's narrow-minded and short-sighted.
Exactly to the point! In its day, JOVIAL was a great programming
language, but who the heck knows it today? In 1970, a student taking a
programming languages course would be likely be exposed to COBOL,
FORTRAN, Algol and perhaps PL/I. How many students today are conversant
in those? Those were the big "general-purpose" languages and you'd be
unlikely to find a job not knowing at least two of those.
We ran into that with COBOL and Y2K, which surprised me, since I didn't
think that COBOL had quite gone out of fashion yet in 1998. Back then I
wondered if there were any extant 7080 autocoder applications still
running around (running under emulation) that needed updating.
Times change and it's always best to take the broad view of learning as
many languages as opportunity affords.
Down at the bottom, it's all machine code. --Chuck
But for the most part Common Folk did not have the resources
I suspect for REAL programing languages, because those require
a REAL OS to run with, and after the 8086 the Newer chips became
too complex to use, and the 68000 was only 16 bit addressing.
Then Windows came out and NON-DIS-CLOSER become the norm.
Then hardware and plug and play... USB... IBM packed decimal.
Ben.
PS:
The Only hardware gripe I have with Oberon you just have 1 SD
slot. What if I want to back up the card?
9:17 p.m.
On 04/25/2016 02:14 PM, ben wrote:
But for the most part Common Folk did not have the
resources I
suspect for REAL programing languages, because those require a REAL
OS to run with, and after the 8086 the Newer chips became too complex
to use, and the 68000 was only 16 bit addressing.
Say what? The MC68000 has 24 bits of addressing (A0-A23). The A0-A7
registers are 32 bits in length, even though 24 bits are used for addresses.
--Chuck
10:05 p.m.
On 4/25/2016 7:17 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 04/25/2016 02:14 PM, ben wrote:
DIM FLOAT J(256,256), FLOAT SUM
How do you access variable I cleanly, if DIRECT LONG is not a option?
Ben.
But for the most part Common Folk did not have
the resources I
suspect for REAL programing languages, because those require a REAL
OS to run with, and after the 8086 the Newer chips became too complex
to use, and the 68000 was only 16 bit addressing.
Say what? The MC68000 has 24 bits of addressing (A0-A23). The A0-A7
registers are 32 bits in length, even though 24 bits are used for addresses.
11:37 p.m.
On 04/25/2016 07:05 PM, ben wrote:
DIM FLOAT J(256,256), FLOAT SUM
How do you access variable I cleanly, if DIRECT LONG is not a
option? Ben.
What variable I? You haven't declared it.
You have 32 bit A and D registers. You do your arithmetic in the D
registers and move the result to the appropriate A register and Bob's
your uncle.
It's a whole lot more straightforward than coding in Large mode on an 8086.
--Chuck
26 Apr
26 Apr
10:51 a.m.
New subject: Real OS (was: strangest systems I've sent email from)
On Apr 25, 2016, at 5:14 PM, ben <bfranchuk at
jetnet.ab.ca> wrote:
But for the most part Common Folk did not have the resources
I suspect for REAL programing languages, because those require
a REAL OS to run with, and after the 8086 the Newer chips became
too complex to use, and the 68000 was only 16 bit addressing.
Then Windows came out and NON-DIS-CLOSER become the norm.
I'm not sure what a "real OS" is, nor why it is required to run a "real
programming language" (whatever that is).
Is FORTH a real language? You can run FORTH on pretty much anything, and porting it to a
new architecture may take only a few days. On complex machines (like 64 bit MIPS) it
might take a little longer. If you want to replace the boot ROM as well, then things get
complex, because you may have to do stuff like initialize the memory controller. But all
that sort of thing is still done routinely.
Also, you can find any number of lightweight OS for lots of machines, environments where
even languages like C++ are readily available. Or you can write your own, as the team I
work with has done; if you have specific and well-bounded requirements that's not a
big deal.
paul
27 Apr
27 Apr
12:34 a.m.
New subject: The Ivory Tower saga was Re: strangest systems I've sent email
What a pile of stuff, much of which ties in (in various directions)
with things I've been thinking.
In no particular order....
Grades - ideally, yes, grades would be unnecessary. But in a system
where others depend on something at least vaguely objective to measure
whether people know things, some kind of grading is necessary.
Does it have to be done the way it's done now? Of course not. But,
unless you can also eliminate a bunch of the other societal mechanisms
and conventions that have accreted around the educational system, it
needs to be done.
Unless you are doing something purely for the students. I once taught
a weekend course with no grading of any sort. Every student got a
piece of paper I signed certifying they had attended the course, but
there was nothing at all - save of course the students' increased
proficiency in the subject matter - indicating how much the various
students had got out of it. In some respects I think that's the best
way to handle education/training/learning, but it's difficult to get
completely away from the rest of those mechanisms and conventions I
mentioned above.
This segues neatly into the distinction someone raised between
education and training. Again, I would say that ideally there should
be no distinction, but that in this society (and I suspect that, for
all their differences, the societies most/all of the listmembers live
in are more or less the same in this regard), there is a substantial
operational distinction between the sort of background fundamentals
that were called "education" and the sort of focused specifics that
were called "training". Especially in North America, there used to be
a distinction between "university" and "college", with universities
providing "education" and colleges providing "training".
Unfortunately, this is on the way to getting lost - I recommend Paul
Fussell's delightful little book _Class_, which, among other things,
has a chapter or two about how colleges got redesignated universities
and trade schools colleges; that feels related to me.
I'm inclined to agree that the societal purpose of universities is
advancing the state of the art, whereas that of trade schools is
preparing people for jobs (in whichever industry the school covers).
Today's blurring of this distinction I see as symptomatic of much of
the problem with today's educational system.
I was trained - er, educated, I guess :) - as a mathematician, with a
side order of computer science (B.Sc. major in maths, minor in CS). In
practice, though, I'm neither mathematician nor computer scientist, but
rather programmer and sysadmin. Yet the maths and CS training were
extremely valuable to me; I am a far better programmer and sysadmin for
having the math and CS background.
Take also, for example, Lisp. I've used Lisp. I even wrote a Lisp
engine. I love the language, even though I almost never use it. But
some of the mental patterns it has given me inform much of the code I
write regardless of language. I have seen it said that a language that
does not change the way you think about programming is not worth
knowing. I think that goes too far, but something weaker along the
same lines _is_ true, and Lisp is a good vehicle for some of those
changes. (Adding continuations to my Lisp engine was a fascinating
experience, one well worth the time and effort involved, even though I
have never used them for anything serious.) And I do not exclude
low-level languages; just as I think knowing Lisp makes me a better
programmer even when not using Lisp, I also think my knowing assembly
and machine language for various processors makes me a better
programmer even when not using them. (And, yes, the people who think
Lisp is useless-in-practice clearly have never looked even the tiniest
bit under the hood of GNU Emacs.)
People have remarked on the knowing of multiple languages. I would say
it matters terribly what the languages in question are. Knowing C,
JavaScript, Pascal, and awk is, for example, very very different from
knowing Lisp, Prolog, Objective-C, and TeX, even though each one hits
the same putative "knows four languages" tickbox on a hiring form. I
draw a sharp distinction between "programming" and "programming in
$LANGUAGE", for any value of $LANGUAGE. Someone who knows the latter
may be able to get a job writing code in $LANGUAGE...but someone who
groks the former can pick up any language in relatively short order.
The bracketed note in the second paragraph of content on
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/personality.html is exactly the sort of
thing I'm talking about here; ESR taught himself TeX by the simple
expedient of reading the TeXBook.
One particular message seems to me to call for individual response:
There are two major language families: declarative and
imperative.
[...] Declarative langauges are [...]. A few langauges under this
family:
Prolog
Agreed, though AIUI the presence of cuts weakens this somewhat.
(Caveat, I don't really grok Prolog; I may be misunderstanding.)
make (and yes, make is a declarative language)
Only, I would say, in its simplest forms. Every make implementation I
know of (including both at least one BSD variant and at least one
version of GNU make) stops looking very declarative when you have to do
anything at all complex.
SQL
I don't see SQL as declarative. I see it as imperative, with the
relational table as its primary data type. That the programmer doesn't
have to hand-hold the implementation in figuring out how to perform a
SELECT doesn't make SQL declarative any more than the code not
describing how to implement mapcar makes Lisp declarative.
/~\ The ASCII Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org
/ \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
12:55 p.m.
New subject: The Ivory Tower saga was Re: strangest systems I've sent email
It was thus said that the Great Mouse once stated:
I think those are poorly written Makefiles then. I've dived into GnuMake
rather deeply over the past year, and it's amazing how concise you can make
a Makefile, even for a large project. And the hardest part is really
getting the dependencies correct (but when you do, "make -j" really
flies on modern hardware).
I don't see it a imperative.
SELECT what FROM there WHERE ... ORDER-BY ...
You just describe what you want and how you want it ordered, unless I'm
missing something else. Granted, I don't work a lot with SQL (or with
stored procedures).
-spc
[1] The book used the realloc() function as the example---this function
can allocate and free memory, depending upon the parameters. In
fact, every possible combination of parameters is valid but will do
radically different things. It doesn't make testing harder (in this
case) but a logical misstep is harder to track down.
Better would be to have:
void *memory_alloc(size_t);
void *memory_grow(void *,size_t);
void *memory_shrink(void *,size_t);
void memory_free(void *);
Where you are explicit about what you are doing (and for
convenience, I can see memory_grow(NULL,x) being valid (allocate
memory) to mimic the reason realloc() is mostly used for.
Take also, for example, Lisp. I've used Lisp. I even wrote a Lisp
engine. I love the language, even though I almost never use it. But
some of the mental patterns it has given me inform much of the code I
write regardless of language. I have seen it said that a language that
does not change the way you think about programming is not worth
knowing.
In my case, it wasn't knowing a language that changed how I think about
programming, but a book, _Thinking Forth_ by Leo Brodie. Think Agile
programming but in the mid-80s instead of the early 2000s. That it
described programming in Forth is immaterial---I've been able to apply the
lessons from that book to every language I've used since reading it.
The other book that changed how I program was _Writing Solid Code_ by
Steve Maguire (from Microsoft Press of all places). Think programming by
contract and single purpose functions [1].
The only languages that have had any influence on how I program are the
functional languages (summary: no globals, pass in state and avoid mutations
as much as possible)---it's not one single language.
People have remarked on the knowing of multiple
languages. I would say
it matters terribly what the languages in question are.
I think knowing the different families and how they work is important than
any individual language.
Knowing C,
JavaScript, Pascal, and awk is, for example, very very different from
knowing Lisp, Prolog, Objective-C, and TeX, even though each one hits
the same putative "knows four languages" tickbox on a hiring form.
True, and if I were hiring, I might worry that the programmer who knew
Lisp, Prolog, Objective-C and TeX might not want to work here where we deal
with C, C++ and Javascript as they're "not as nice to work with." But I
wouldn't discount them either.
I
draw a sharp distinction between "programming" and "programming in
$LANGUAGE", for any value of $LANGUAGE. Someone who knows the latter
may be able to get a job writing code in $LANGUAGE...but someone who
groks the former can pick up any language in relatively short order.
The bracketed note in the second paragraph of content on
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/personality.html is exactly the sort of
thing I'm talking about here; ESR taught himself TeX by the simple
expedient of reading the TeXBook.
You mean not everybody does this?
One particular message seems to me to call for
individual response:
Cuts are a form of optimization (if I understand what they do). They just
cut down on the problem space.
There are two major language families:
declarative and imperative.
[...] Declarative langauges are [...]. A few langauges under this
family:
Prolog
Agreed, though AIUI the presence of cuts weakens this somewhat.
(Caveat, I don't really grok Prolog; I may be misunderstanding.) make (and
yes, make is a declarative language)
Only, I would say, in its simplest forms. Every make implementation I
know of (including both at least one BSD variant and at least one
version of GNU make) stops looking very declarative when you have to do
anything at all complex. SQL
I don't see SQL as declarative. I see it as imperative, with the
relational table as its primary data type. That the programmer doesn't
have to hand-hold the implementation in figuring out how to perform a
SELECT doesn't make SQL declarative any more than the code not
describing how to implement mapcar makes Lisp declarative.
2982
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9 comments
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-
bfranchuk＠jetnet.ab.ca -
blstuart＠bellsouth.net -
cclist＠sydex.com -
mouse＠Rodents-Montreal.ORG -
paulkoning＠comcast.net -
spc＠conman.org -
swiftgriggs＠gmail.com