Re: Moving from a proprietary OS - unnecessarily inful experience -- was [Re: I wish to advocate linux]
Le Ven 1 mars 2013 0:20, Miles Fidelman a écrit :
> - those of us who go back a bit date from a time when computer science
> was an offshoot of electrical engineering
> analog and digital circuitry before ever touching a computer - gives a
> very different perspective than starting with programming
I agree for the hardware approach. I do not agree for the "a bit date from
a time..." since there are still people studying electronic.
This is not an age problem.
I'm less than 30 years old, and only have low grades. But I have knowledge
of electricity laws. And my lack of grades and/or age do not imply that I
could not understand/use any old computer.
In fact, I'm sure that I would think of them as nice toys. Real mode is
easier to manipulate than protected mode, and x86 assembly was far easier
before 32 bit computers.
> - one of the results of this experience is that hardware compatibility
> and driver issues are second nature to those who grew up with them; whereas
> younger folks who have grown up with pre-loaded operating systems and
> "plug and play devices" tend to find linux (and BSD)
> installations a bit more daunting (leading in many cases to whining)
Old peoples quickly whine those kind of things, too. Think about it:
"Before, we had no need of Internet. There were less things to understand.
We had less codes to remember."
You know, there are young people who were used to DOS before being 10
years old.
We are used to hardware boring stuff, and when I see the word
SoundBlaster, it always makes me remember of those games were I spent time
to have sounds, when I known no word of English.
People who whine, do that anyway. Being 20 or 70 years old changes nothing.
On the other side, Linux driver stuff is more boring because you have to
guess the modules names. To try to compile a damn kernel with only stuff
you really need is a pain, whatever documents says. Of course, typing
"make && make install" is easy. But choosing options is not.
When you are using a widely used system, you have far more problems (I had
more problems of unrecognized hardware on windows than on linux), but when
they are solved, it is far more quickly and in a more friendly way. People
does not even have to understand what is a "compilation".
Being a programmer, I feel like people see computer sciences as dark
magic, and "computing people" as sorcerers (just for that, I should try
that distro, sorcerer ;) ). I wonder if I could continue that analogy by
comparing linux users to necromancers :D (after all, we are able to revive
old computers hehe)
> - also, those of us who date back a few years still think of computers
> as things that "need some assembly" and bring that view to system software
> as well
Well, here, let me laugh.
Something which needs some assembly, is composed of objects, right?
When you built your computer, you do not try to reproduce the cards
before, they are simple objects?
What are objects in programming? OOP. Modules. Stuff you can reuse without
having to understand exactly how it works, simply read the doc, and plug
the lib in your software.
Now, I remember a colleague, ~50 years old (when I was ~25), which had a
really strange thinking of Oriented Object Programming or simply about how
to reuse: when he wanted to reuse something, he simply copied/pasted parts
of source code from the lib into his software... What he was doing worked,
and he sometimes impressed me, but his conception of re-usability was a
shame.
Anew, age is not relevant here.
What is relevant is programmer's ability to split complex problems in
simpler ones, to solve those multiple problems, and to use all those
simple solutions to build a more complex one which will solve the initial
problem.
> Which leads me to take just a little issue with your comment that
> "younger people have more useful experience." I'm actually not entirely
> sure that's true. If anything, younger people have narrower (or at least
> different) experience.
Well, you have a lot of "deprecated" experience. I do not want to
denigrate your knowledge, since it gave you a way to think and do things
and since young programmers are full of such deprecated knowledge, but how
useful is now your knowledge about motorola assembly? About INT 21H? About
address A000:0000 in mode 13H?
That knowledge was very useful yesterday, but now, it is deprecated,
unusable.
It imply that you know some basics about memory and CPU, but in itself, it
have now no use.
And I only mentioned stuff of 90's here. Only 20 years old.
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