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| An observation on homework problems |
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| tggzzz:
--- Quote from: paulca on August 13, 2020, 11:17:38 am ---Oh and a small story. In the penultimate year of high school my attendance was around 15% and my presence in the "Technology" class was, literally 2 classes in that year. I showed up to the end of year exam and when marked it was 84%. The class went nuts and cried foul. How could I get 85% when I was never in school and had only attended 2 classes out about maybe 35? They demanded my paper be remarked. So... they remarked it, a different teacher gave me 86%. I didn't do a shred of homework or even a shred of class work. The material was just plainly obvious to me. It was around the time I kinda realised where my career should be pointed. --- End quote --- I passed an English Literature exam witha respectable grade after 1 hours revision. I wasn't interested in the subject, and that confirmed my opinion. Asimov's old story "Profession" significantly shaped my career choices. The points are as true today as they were in the 50s. Hence it is still worth speed-reading it at https://www.abelard.org/asimov.php (Even though the page's style is stuck in the geocities era :) ) I've just re-read it, and come to realise it anticipates modern consultancy practices, the decline of apprenticeships, and typical training courses. |
| paulca:
--- Quote from: tggzzz on August 13, 2020, 12:06:01 pm ---Yebbut, there is little real fundamental change; it is mostly variations on a theme with some semantic sugar and a colour change. Software language examples: C# is Java, Delphi is Pascal, Go's channels are from Hoare's CSP, Objective-C is Smalltalk. Hardware examples: the myriad different MCUs, all programmed in C. --- End quote --- No offence but this sounds like an opinion from the perspective of a low level programmer. No that domain hasn't changed much I agree. No matter what paradigm or trendy language you use it all boils down to basic Jackson structured programming at the end of the day. The difficulties I am more referring to is the higher levels. Frameworks, platforms, AaaS, SaaS, PaaS, Cloud, Big Data, Clustering etc. Your education and experience allows you to read the documentation and be much faster at knowing what exactly to google and when, but each of these technologies introduces a lot of complexities and bespoke processes and nomenclature. For example, if you were an experienced coder in C or Java and I sat you down to a project and said it was in a Big Data cluster using Kubernetes and Docker, running on a Hadoop cluster utilising Spark. There is very little a basic set of core programming experience will help you with there. Nothing is quite as it seems anymore and there is a whole new glossary of terms... trying to use it like a normal local application node will lead to pain. |
| tggzzz:
--- Quote from: paulca on August 13, 2020, 12:29:29 pm --- --- Quote from: tggzzz on August 13, 2020, 12:06:01 pm ---Yebbut, there is little real fundamental change; it is mostly variations on a theme with some semantic sugar and a colour change. Software language examples: C# is Java, Delphi is Pascal, Go's channels are from Hoare's CSP, Objective-C is Smalltalk. Hardware examples: the myriad different MCUs, all programmed in C. --- End quote --- No offence but this sounds like an opinion from the perspective of a low level programmer. No that domain hasn't changed much I agree. No matter what paradigm or trendy language you use it all boils down to basic Jackson structured programming at the end of the day. --- End quote --- You couldn't be more wrong, about me and about JSP. I investigated JSP (and the other contemporary techniques) in the mid 80s, and rejected it as boring and not the way forward. My decisions and choices at that time have been proven correct. --- Quote ---The difficulties I am more referring to is the higher levels. Frameworks, platforms, AaaS, SaaS, PaaS, Cloud, Big Data, Clustering etc. Your education and experience allows you to read the documentation and be much faster at knowing what exactly to google and when, but each of these technologies introduces a lot of complexities and bespoke processes and nomenclature. --- End quote --- Been there, done some of those, some in HPLabs, some in other companies. Always at the bleeding edge where there were no available training courses. I got sick of seeing async protocols layered on top of sync protocols layered on top of async protocols layered on top of async protocols for at least five different layers. And still people don't understand the "fallicies of distributed computing". They think because the framework documentation omits to mention them, the problems have been solved. Ha. As for people understanding the limits defined by Lamport, or the Byzantine General's problems, or the split brain problem, they have no clue. They think FSMs are something to do with compilers. --- Quote ---For example, if you were an experienced coder in C or Java and I sat you down to a project and said it was in a Big Data cluster using Kubernetes and Docker, running on a Hadoop cluster utilising Spark. There is very little a basic set of core programming experience will help you with there. Nothing is quite as it seems anymore and there is a whole new glossary of terms... trying to use it like a normal local application node will lead to pain. --- End quote --- Well, I have archtected several high-availability soft real-time distributed systems, so I do have a clue about the "large scale" problems and how they can be ameliorated (not solved). |
| coppice:
--- Quote from: tggzzz on August 13, 2020, 12:52:29 pm ---You couldn't be more wrong, about me and about JSP. I investigated JSP (and the other contemporary techniques) in the mid 80s, and rejected it as boring and not the way forward. My decisions and choices at that time have been proven correct. --- End quote --- JSP was just another cult. People came back from the JSP courses like religious converts, but later realised they'd got very little from it. The mid 80s was a little late to be looking at Jackson, Yourdon, etc. They had already passed peak BS by then. |
| tggzzz:
--- Quote from: coppice on August 13, 2020, 01:12:32 pm --- --- Quote from: tggzzz on August 13, 2020, 12:52:29 pm ---You couldn't be more wrong, about me and about JSP. I investigated JSP (and the other contemporary techniques) in the mid 80s, and rejected it as boring and not the way forward. My decisions and choices at that time have been proven correct. --- End quote --- JSP was just another cult. People came back from the JSP courses like religious converts, but later realised they'd got very little from it. The mid 80s was a little late to be looking at Jackson, Yourdon, etc. They had already passed peak BS by then. --- End quote --- Since I picked up JSP from a book comparing all the techniques, it was late. Once I figured out that JSP was a mechanical limited version of what I'd been doing naturally for several years, I was unimpressed. I never knew any practitioners of any of the techniques, so I can't comment on religious conversion :) I, and everybody I've worked with, have always picked apart techniques and technologies to find what is good and, um, less good. |
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