"Morel Bérenger" wrote:
Le Ven 1 mars 2013 0:20, Miles Fidelman a écrit :- 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 wellWell, 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.
Fair enough, but... I have to say it....Back in my day, we not only had to walk to school, uphill, in both directions, in the snow, but we also had to build our computers by hand, from TTL logic gates. :-)
Seriously, though... these days, the objects we deal with are a lot bigger and more complex, and often contain "no user serviceable parts." There's something qualitatively different between a wire-wrap board containing logic gates, and a CPU chip.
I will maintain that one has a different perspective if one has had to get down in the weeds. When I was in school, we had an old PDP-1 in a lab where users were allowed (even encouraged) to add new machine instructions by wire-wrapping them onto the backplane. Other people were busily building micro computers from kits (can you say IMSAI?). In one of my early jobs, we designed embedded avionic computers, which included things like designing the instruction set, designing the microcode that implemented macroinstructions, and then the board level design. At the time, our pride and joy was a single-board machine (about micro-itx size), faster than anything else around, that consisted about 100 ECL flatpacks on each side of a 16-layer, double sided circuit board. The hardest part of the design actually turned out to be designing the circuit boards to carry heat to the edges of the board - to mate up with the cooling system. Now what we considered fast (4.2mflops if I recall) is laughably slow by today's standards - but I maintain that we learned a lot that provides a lot of perspective into the present.
Now, I won't deny that there are younger folks who've learned such things as well; nor will I deny that there are things that people learn today that are equally or more valuable (say, chip design). But I will say that as the low-level black boxes become more complicated, and less accessible, and less taught, we've lost a lot.
The best comparison I can make is to cars. Used to be that most people could do simple maintenance and roadside repair - oil changes, jiggle a stuck carburetor, etc. Auto shop was commonly taught in high school, lots of people customized their cars, and so forth. These days, a lot more of our cars consist of things we can't get to (fuel injectors instead of carburetors, engine control computers instead of mechanical linkages), its hard to find an auto shop course outside a trade school, and the most that many people can do in the way of self-help is to call AAA from their cell phone.
My sense is that the computer world is somewhere in the middle of this kind of transition. More and more people are only prepared to use something that comes out-of-the-box pre-loaded with software, and get disturbed and flustered when faced with the need for "some user assembly required."
Is this a bad thing? For users, probably not. When I'm reading a book, I want a Nook or Kindle to be as transparent and easy-to-use as a printed book. When it comes to folks who are going to build the next generation of technology, it's a big problem.
FYI, there's an interesting discussion right now, on opensource.com, on "growing the next generation of hackers" that relates to these issues - http://opensource.com/education/13/2/next-generation-open-source-hackers
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.
Well... don't know about Motorola assembly, but I expect my experience with both PDP-10 and Z80 assembly is still relevant in several regards:
- it's not the details of any specific assembly language that matter - they all have roughly the same function set (well, not exactly true; there are RISC vs. CISC distinctions, and there were really funny instruction sets like the DG Nova, that looked a lot more like microcode - kind of nice to be able to do an add, rotate, and shift in one instruction when you're doing image analysis)
- programming in assembly code requires a different mind-set than programming in a higher-level language (the more so if you're not running on top of an operating system, say when building low-level controllers for physical machinery) -- when you aren't using an o/s you learn a lot about hardware interaction and control; when you are using an o/s you learn a lot about how instructions flow through system
- more generally, once you've coded in a few assembly languages, you can program in any of them - it's a matter of knowing that a function exists, and then how to look up the specific syntax in the manual - you do learn pretty quickly the difference between a good macro-assembler and a poor one (PDP-10 and Z80 were both exceptional in that regard)
- and while I maintain that it's more a matter of perspective, I beg to differ about "deprecated" - the Z80 and direct derivatives are still popular chips, going strong after 35 or so years in the market!
Cheers, Miles -- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra