G+_Lee Crocker Posted June 6, 2014 Share Posted June 6, 2014 Great interview with Karl Auerbach. Reminds me of me. But now every time I try to impress someone about how long I've been programming and what I've contributed to the net, I'll have to start with, "Well, I'm no Karl Auerbach, but..." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Darryl Medley Posted June 6, 2014 Share Posted June 6, 2014 He was great. I thought it was interesting that he still feels that coders should know every bit that their programs control. That's probably necessary for embedded real-time systems but I'm not sure if it's really practical for the complex GUI apps of today. The trend in language development, Swift being the latest example, is for low-level things like memory deallocation to be automatic. On the other hand, I remember 30 years ago the "next big thing" was 4th-gen languages like Progress that were suppose to automate things and eliminate most coding. Of course that didn't work out because complex logic is still needed to make real-world programs. It seems like we're still searching for the right balance of simplicity and low-level control. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Lee Crocker Posted June 6, 2014 Author Share Posted June 6, 2014 I'm with him on that too. It's OK for a language to have things like garbage collection (even Go does, for example), but that doesn't excuse a programmer from understanding what is being done for him and at least vaguely how it is accomplished. A programmer should know things like how much ram is taken up by basic data types, what kind of operations are fast on his machine and which are slow, what kind of network bandwidth and latency his app needs, etc. Sure, your language can take care of a lot of details for you, but you should still know what they are and why they matter. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Michael Polinske Posted June 7, 2014 Share Posted June 7, 2014 I thought Karl was a great interview as well. I think programmers need to know what their code is doing and that computers are very literal and will only do exactly what you tell them. My day job is a mainframe Cobol programmer and when I do code reviews, I look first at the actual code to make sure it is doing what the definition says and then I review the output. If the code is correct, then the output should be correct. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Rudy Rodriguez Posted June 7, 2014 Share Posted June 7, 2014 Darryl Medley OMG, I remember Progress! I was learning that concurrently with FOCUS. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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