Re: [OT] One for the iPhone/iTouch users

Champ <neal@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

On Wed, 19 Mar 2008 07:18:44 +0000, Timo Geusch
<tnewsSPAMMENOT@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

My comment was more targeted at the "teach students to push IDE buttons"
type of programmer education that you tend to see a lot these days in
response to the usual brain-dead industry demands for more fully-hatched
"J2EE gurus with gllrwrkszz on CrozzPolination", even if they can't tell
a mergesort from a bubblesort and have no fucking idea as to what
O-notation is. As long as they're "productive" from day one and can be
easily transferred into the company's street cleaning division as soon
as the new buzzwords come out.

But that's OK, with those infinitely powerful machines we have these
days with infinite RAM and unfeasibly large amounts of disk space, we
don't need to worry about burning CPU cycles and running out of memory
any more, so we don't need no steenkin' basics anymore, do we?

But what do I know, I've only been doing this kind of *** for about 20
years...

To be honest, you sound like someone who'd been doing it for 20 years
and hasn't realised that the world has moved on, and continues to move
on. If you think saving CPU cycles and memory is as important as it
was 20 years ago, then it's no wonder you're not doing well.

Yeah, barely able to pay the mortgage, me. 's bad enough for me to
consider opening a bike shop instead.

You're missing a fundamental point here - the technologies used to write
software might change and are changing very rapidly at the moment,
mainly due to the need to make use of parallelisation in order to keep
up with the developments on the CPU side of things. However, /none/ of
this means that budding programmers suddenly don't need to learn about
the fundamentals anymore, which was my original point. Unfortunately I'm
seeing a lot of that whenever I'm interviewing people. In fact, this
article here is a good summary of what I'm wittering on about:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchools.html


Just because we've got tons more memory, automated garbage collection
systems that work 99.9% of the time and virtual memory systems that
work, doesn't mean developers don't need to understand basic memory
management. Unless you want to have to restart the server process every
n hours because it's about to run out of memory, that is...

Of course development is nothing like it was 20 years ago. Why would
you want it to be? What do you think it's going to be like in another
100 years?

Different, and people will still want to run more complex *** than the
hardware they bought will be able to accommodate in the timeframe the
users want it to complete.

However, you'll probably find that the underlying algorithms haven't
changed that much.

Programming computers well is *hard*, and that's something that hasn't
changed. We've got far better tools now than we used to have - and
that's a good thing - but the tools we have are barely keeping in step
with the additional complexities we are encountering due to the fact
that we're building bigger systems all the time . And that's something I
don't expect to change anytime soon.

That is, unless you subscribe to the PHB motto of "if I don't understand
it, it must be easy".

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