Blue White wrote to Arelor <=-

That business model is at least part of what lead to the dot.com crash
in the late 1990s.

Those were heady times. I loved reading fuckedcompany.com and seeing
companies with horrendously non-viable business ideas, like flake.com,
a social network for people who like breakfast cereal.

A company had their comeout party in San Francisco and closed
operations the next day.

I worked for a company that offered free MP3 downloads of indie music -
they'd negotiated rights with indie labels like SubPop. I recall being
in meetings with Yahoo to negotiate a deal, and no one was sure who
should be paying whom - were we paying them for exposure, or were they
paying us for content?

Strange times, indeed.



... When in doubt, predict that the trend will continue.
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On 15 Jan 2024 at 09:22a, poindexter FORTRAN pondered and said...

Blue White wrote to Arelor <=-

That business model is at least part of what lead to the dot.com cras in the late 1990s.

Those were heady times. I loved reading fuckedcompany.com and seeing
companies with horrendously non-viable business ideas, like flake.com,
a social network for people who like breakfast cereal.

A company had their comeout party in San Francisco and closed
operations the next day.

I remember something like that. There was a company that
built an actual physical wireless device that interacted with
little sensors all over New York City. They launched and
then went under the next day. All these people who'd bought
these dumb little devices were just out the hundred bucks or
whatever they'd spent for the things.

We cracked one open at the company I worked at at the time
and looked inside. I remember it had a Dragonball Z processor
(Motorola 68000 core, basically) but that's about it.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

Re: Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
By: tenser to poindexter FORTRAN on Mon Jan 08 2024 03:51 am

That makes sense, the PASCAL class was used mostly to teach data structures and algorithms, then everything else was in C, assembler or LISP. In retrospect I'd rather just jump into C or C++ instead of spending time learning another language.

Honestly, at this point, I can't think of a good reason
to teach C at the collegiate level.

C++ (not C) appears to be the collegiate programming language of choice these days. It was Java for a while, C before that, Pascal before that, and FORTRAN before that.
--
digital man (rob)

Breaking Bad quote #47:
He said he'll break my legs, he meant It... he gave me the dead mackerel eyes. Norco, CA WX: 56.4°F, 74.0% humidity, 2 mph NW wind, 0.00 inches rain/24hrs
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tenser wrote to Dr. What <=-

I used to read "Programming Pearls" in the back issues of the Journal of the ACM back in college and had picked up the book. Sadly, I let it go
a long time ago.

I think you meant Communications of the ACM; JACM is mostly
theory. :-)

I'm not sure. By the time I actually joined the ACM, I got Communications. But I'm pretty sure that the back issues I read were called "Journals of the ACM". But I'm uncertain which had "Programming Pearls", but I think it was Communications.

One of the things that surprises me as I get into vintage computers is how much I mis-remember.

Bwk, but yeah. One of the problems was that they were
working in the context of standard Pascal, so they didn't
have some of the nice-ities that say Turbo Pascal brought
to the language (like a string type). It would have been
interesting to see a version of Software Tools in e.g.
Oberon.

Ya, the Software Tools was mainly about writing unix-c-like stuff in various languages. But C was becoming the dominate tool by then and Software Tools in OtherLanguage wasn't that much in demand.


... Things working well, no problems. Time to upgrade.
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On 15 Jan 2024 at 06:18p, Digital Man pondered and said...

Re: Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
By: tenser to poindexter FORTRAN on Mon Jan 08 2024 03:51 am

That makes sense, the PASCAL class was used mostly to teach data structures and algorithms, then everything else was in C, assemble LISP. In retrospect I'd rather just jump into C or C++ instead of spending time learning another language.

Honestly, at this point, I can't think of a good reason
to teach C at the collegiate level.

C++ (not C) appears to be the collegiate programming language of choice these days.

Really? God help us.

It was Java for a while, C before that, Pascal before that,
and FORTRAN before that.

Yeah. My sense observing those classes was that
Pascal was used in the lower year classes, then C
for things like compilers, OS, etc. At one point
I saw a COBOL class offered. *shudder*

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

On 16 Jan 2024 at 07:24a, Dr. What pondered and said...

tenser wrote to Dr. What <=-

I used to read "Programming Pearls" in the back issues of the Journal the ACM back in college and had picked up the book. Sadly, I let it a long time ago.

I think you meant Communications of the ACM; JACM is mostly
theory. :-)

I'm not sure. By the time I actually joined the ACM, I got Communications. But I'm pretty sure that the back issues I read were called "Journals of the ACM". But I'm uncertain which had "Programming Pearls", but I think it was Communications.

Communications was considered a journal at one point,
and contained a lot of articles that would be considered
"journal articles" these days, but was never "Journal of
the ACM" which is a separate publication. It's kind of
weird, but in systems, most of the focus is on conference
publications, not publishing in journals (unlike most of
the rest of the research community). So Communications
used to have a lot of papers that were kind of systems-y,
but much less these days. Communications nowadays is
more like a magazine.

One of the things that surprises me as I get into vintage computers is
how much I mis-remember.

And how! I hear you on that.

Bwk, but yeah. One of the problems was that they were
working in the context of standard Pascal, so they didn't
have some of the nice-ities that say Turbo Pascal brought
to the language (like a string type). It would have been
interesting to see a version of Software Tools in e.g.
Oberon.

Ya, the Software Tools was mainly about writing unix-c-like stuff in various languages. But C was becoming the dominate tool by then and Software Tools in OtherLanguage wasn't that much in demand.

Software tools took on a life of its own outside of the
books, and was a thriving project for quite a while,
particularly in the minicomputer era. E.g., it was quite
popular on Pr1me computers.

These days, of course, there's a C compiler for everything;
back then there was a Fortran compiler for everything, and
then a Pascal compiler for everything since that was the
language of teaching for so long. Oberon was the last of
Wirth's languages, and in many respects, it was closer to
C than to Pascal; as such, it remedied many of the short
comings that Kernighan noted in his polemic about Pascal
(for example, in Oberon, the size of an array is not part
of its type, like in C). Had there been an Oberon version
of the book, it may have been a more natural presentation,
like a C version, for many of the utilities. Of course,
Oberon didn't exist at th time.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

On Thursday, January 18th tenser said...

C++ (not C) appears to be the collegiate programming language of

Every time I see students come out of these courses, or the courses themselves, it's really "C with a C++ compiler and we used a stream".

boggles the mind. Hoping people move to Rust. C++ is a disaster, and I can safely say that as someone extremely proficient in the language (up to C++20)


--
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--- ENiGMA 1/2 v0.0.14-beta (linux; x64; 18.18.2)
* Origin: Xibalba -+- xibalba.l33t.codes:44510 (21:1/121)

On 15 Jan 2024, Digital Man said the following...

C++ (not C) appears to be the collegiate programming language of choice these days. It was Java for a while, C before that, Pascal before that, and FORTRAN before that.

back in 2000 i had BASIC and C++ classes. i think BASIC was there to catch people who had to learn what programming even was. then you have C++ to teach them to enjoy pain.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/25 (Windows/32)
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On 16 Jan 2024, NuSkooler said the following...

boggles the mind. Hoping people move to Rust. C++ is a disaster, and I
can safely say that as someone extremely proficient in the language (up
to C++20)

rust isn't the answer. it just allows you to write crap code that doesn't crash. some might think that's a good thing, but it's just another in a long line of bloated junk.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/25 (Windows/32)
* Origin: cold fusion - cfbbs.net - grand rapids, mi (21:1/616)

Re: Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
By: NuSkooler to tenser on Tue Jan 16 2024 09:38 am

C++ (not C) appears to be the collegiate programming language of

Every time I see students come out of these courses, or the courses themselves, it's really "C with a C++ compiler and we used a stream".

They must have a poor curriculum then.. When I was in my software engineering program 20+ years ago, we learned C++ but they taught object-oriented programming from the beginning, and taught about classes, streaming I/O, STL, etc..

boggles the mind. Hoping people move to Rust. C++ is a disaster, and I can safely say that as someone extremely proficient in the language (up to C++20)

I haven't used Rust yet, but I've also used C++ quite a bit. Maybe I had gotten used to C++, but I don't really mind it a whole lot. That said, I've used C# in some projects recently and some things did feel easier to do.

Nightfox

Twas Tuesday, January 16th when fusion said...

rust isn't the answer. it just allows you to write crap code that doesn't crash. some might think that's a good thing, but it's just another in a long line of bloated junk.

Thats certainly the first I've heard such claims. Rust forces you to work with memory safely, forces you to syncronize safely, etc., and compiles down to machine code compariable with C++. I'm really not sure where you get those thoughts.

--
|08 ■ |12NuSkooler |06// |12Xibalba |08- |07"|06The place of fear|07"
|08 ■ |03xibalba|08.|03vip |08(|0344510|08/|03telnet|08, |0344511|08/|03ssh|08)
|08 ■ |03ENiGMA 1/2 WHQ |08| |03Phenom |08| |0367 |08| |03iMPURE |08| |03ACiDic
--- ENiGMA 1/2 v0.0.14-beta (linux; x64; 18.18.2)
* Origin: Xibalba -+- xibalba.l33t.codes:44510 (21:1/121)

Re: Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
By: poindexter FORTRAN to hollowone on Mon Jan 08 2024 06:30 am

I live near Santa Cruz, and drive by the old Borland building
occasionally, Seagate's old office (the address was 1 disk drive...) and where I took a UNIX training class at SCO.

I know that area and buildings well.

My brother lived in Aptos until just recently (moved down south closer to me) and worked for a long long time at Borland, Inprise, CodeGear, Embarcadero Tech (product manager for Delphi, C++Builder, etc.).
--
digital man (rob)

Rush quote #40:
I can learn to resist, anything but temptation
Norco, CA WX: 69.0°F, 45.0% humidity, 6 mph W wind, 0.00 inches rain/24hrs
--- SBBSecho 3.20-Linux
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tenser wrote to Dr. What <=-

the rest of the research community). So Communications
used to have a lot of papers that were kind of systems-y,
but much less these days. Communications nowadays is
more like a magazine.

Ya, I let my membership lapse because they were moving away from computer technology and getting into more social-issues-and-stuff.

Software tools took on a life of its own outside of the
books, and was a thriving project for quite a while,
particularly in the minicomputer era. E.g., it was quite
popular on Pr1me computers.

For me, what was interesting about Software Tools was that it was general, but still kind of basic. So if you wanted to learn a new language, or computer system, it was a accomplishable challenge to port the Software Tools ideas to that language/system.

In the mix, you got experience in that language/system and a box of useful tools. But I think that was the point of Software Tools.

These days, of course, there's a C compiler for everything;
back then there was a Fortran compiler for everything, and
then a Pascal compiler for everything since that was the
language of teaching for so long.

But even back then there was a C compiler for everything with a disk drive. I have a C compiler for all my vintage systems ranging from TRS-80 Model 4P, to CP/M and MS-DOS.

Now, they weren't necessairly really good C compliers and had some serious limitations, but they were there and useable.

Oberon was the last of
Wirth's languages, and in many respects, it was closer to
C than to Pascal; as such, it remedied many of the short
comings that Kernighan noted in his polemic about Pascal
(for example, in Oberon, the size of an array is not part
of its type, like in C). Had there been an Oberon version
of the book, it may have been a more natural presentation,
like a C version, for many of the utilities. Of course,
Oberon didn't exist at th time.

Ya, but we have to take the market into account as well and what developers wanted.

Pascal served us well as a teaching tool, but the market demand was for C and I got that in college.

Oberon sounds nice, but if everyone wants to learn C, no one pays attention to the other options.


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* Origin: cold fusion - cfbbs.net - grand rapids, mi (21:1/616)

tenser wrote to Digital Man <=-

Yeah. My sense observing those classes was that
Pascal was used in the lower year classes, then C
for things like compilers, OS, etc. At one point
I saw a COBOL class offered. *shudder*

That's pretty much how things were when I went to college.

Add in LISP for the AI classes.

COBOL was only a business college class, though, not Computer Science.


... Every silver lining has a cloud around it.
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--- Mystic BBS/QWK v1.12 A47 2021/12/25 (Windows/32)
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On 16 Jan 2024 at 12:51p, fusion pondered and said...

rust isn't the answer. it just allows you to write crap code that doesn't crash. some might think that's a good thing, but it's just another in a long line of bloated junk.

I've heard claims like this before, but I haven't experienced
it myself. I came to Rust very skeptical, but figured if it
could deliver on even a quarter of its claims I'd be way ahead
of C; it's pleasantly surprised me, and I've been using it
professionally for about 5 years now. One _can_ write poor
Rust code, of course, but generally I've found much of it to
be quite good.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

Re: Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
By: tenser to fusion on Thu Jan 18 2024 05:35 am

I've heard claims like this before, but I haven't experienced it myself.
I came to Rust very skeptical, but figured if it could deliver on even a quarter of its claims I'd be way ahead of C; it's pleasantly surprised me, and I've been using it professionally for about 5 years now. One _can_

What are you using it for? I've heard people like Rust, but none of the companies I've worked at have used Rust at all.

Nightfox

On 17 Jan 2024 at 09:18a, Nightfox pondered and said...

I've heard claims like this before, but I haven't experienced it myse I came to Rust very skeptical, but figured if it could deliver on eve quarter of its claims I'd be way ahead of C; it's pleasantly surprise and I've been using it professionally for about 5 years now. One _ca

What are you using it for? I've heard people like Rust, but none of the companies I've worked at have used Rust at all.

Me personally, mostly kernel level code. I've written one
small kernel, one complete operating system (well, the kernel
and C library are in Rust; most of the userspace programs are
in C), two virtual machine monitors (that is, the component of
a hypervisor that drives the virtualization hardware and OS
components; not the userspace part like QEMU or proxmox. Both
of these were type-1 hypervisors, so think something equivalent
to Xen), and the boot loader that runs from the reset vector
on the machines we build and sell for work. I've done a
smattering of userspace programs and libraries, too, but it's
been mostly bare metal on big multicore x86 machines. Oh! I
wrote the firmware for an optical mouse I designed and built
that's a clone of the old Depraz mouse. That uses embassy on
an STM32 microcontroller (ARM Cortex-M).

I remember when we were writing the first hypervisor and I
wrote the code to parse ACPI tables and find all the processors;
the code walked the ACPI tables after it found them in physical
memory and built little data structures representing them;
this is really early bringup code and I didn't have a memory
allocator yet, so I stored the parsed representation of the
tables in a static array; I think it had 10 elements. When I
first ran it, it was under QEMU and that only had like 3 or 4
tables. But the first time I ran it on real hardware, all of
a sudden there were a dozen or so: more than I had space for.
But, it was a debug build, so all array accesses are bounds
checked; I got a well-formed panic and the machine stopped in
a halt loop. Had it been C, I'd probably just have walked off
the end of the array and trashed memory that early. It struck
me that this was REALLY powerful, and the hair on my arm actually
stood up on end.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
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Yes. A lot of programmers seem to _really_ love complexity,
and some I'm sad to say view their ability to handle complexity
as a sign of superiority over those around them who, perhaps,
can't keep quite as much in their heads at one time. It's not
great.

If one observes these things long enough then figures that something once simple becomes complex and then unnecessary complex, meaning bloated.

Then the level of over-bloatness is so big that next gen of developers tweaks with syntax to achieve exactly the same thing just simpler and on the next gen platforms (HW/OS). Then previous generation sometimes discovers it and if they are progressive they simplify back what was discovered as new, adapting to new world... then all generations contribute to the continual bloating process.. and that's how we have cycles defined...

Syntax, operativeness, tool sets, paradigms... all are applied to these and are subjects of decades long fashions...

At the end the only thing that matters is the ability to simplify.. thanks to that APIs in the good old C frameworks I keep discovering today... are so much better than those from 20 years ago.. just because people learnt all that across different tools, platforms, languages and paradigms... and turned it back to a simple statement.

-h1

... Xerox Alto was the thing. Anything after we use is just a mere copy.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
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I remember when they "Numerical Recipes in FORTRAN" book became
"Numerical Recipes in C". C seemed like the wrong language for the
higher-level stuff that FORTRAN did well.

I remember that book for C. I liked it. Can't compare to Fortran, but it was enlightening me a lot in my early C days. That one and The one explaining fundamental data structures.

-h1

... Xerox Alto was the thing. Anything after we use is just a mere copy.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
* Origin: 2o fOr beeRS bbs>>>20ForBeers.com:1337 (21:2/150)

Office Politics 101. Now, that would be a valuable class!

As vaulable as Data Structures, FORTRAN and C, that's for sure.

Teaching social skills to a nerdy crowd is probably hard work, too, so good teachers there would be _invaluable_.

But the comment on Data Structures reminds me how I had a hard time with the class the first time, and dropped out of CS soon after, mostly feeling as though it wasn't my people, for whatever reason. But also just being awful at the math classes (not because I couldn't understand it; because I've never been good at _studying_.)

But the second time through? It was fun! Just kinda neat to see how the various things fit together.

Kind of like how I enjoy explaining a matrix sort, because it's something I use in daily life, but people don't understand. _Especially_ when getting away from base 10.

But the concept is really cool, as you can take a stack of stickers for a sticker album, and sort them touching each sticker exactly three times.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Storm BBS (21:2/108)

Adept wrote to Dr. What <=-

Teaching social skills to a nerdy crowd is probably hard work, too, so good teachers there would be _invaluable_.

Yup. Plus having teachers who have spent some time in the corporate world would have been very helpful. I don't think I've ever had a teacher that hadn't spent his whole career in academia.

But the second time through? It was fun! Just kinda neat to see how the various things fit together.

It takes time to build up that base of knowledge that you need to "get" the rest of it.

My dad taught 8th grade science, so I was exposed to that at a very early age. That laid the base for me when he bought home a TRS-80 Model I for the summer.


... Today is a good day to bribe a high--ranking official.
___ MultiMail/Linux v0.52

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Yup. Plus having teachers who have spent some time in the corporate
world would have been very helpful. I don't think I've ever had a
teacher that hadn't spent his whole career in academia.

That _does_ make sense, though that sort of thing is so hard -- teaching _is_ a skill, so it kind of becomes like training an astronaut to drill, or teaching drillers to be an astronaut.

(Bad example, awful movie (because of the science), but I think it conveys the idea)

But you either wind up with someone who never learned to teach, or someone who never had corporate experience. Or someone who spent a few years changing careers when they could've just continued working in the field.

My dad taught 8th grade science, so I was exposed to that at a very
early age. That laid the base for me when he bought home a TRS-80 Model
I for the summer.

That makes sense. My dad got a computer early on (I vaguely remember the purchase, and looking _up_ at the store counter), and I think having to understand how a computer works helped with gaining various repair logic skills. And with those skills I started doing tech support at least by 5th grade when I got called out of a class to fix a computer.

And, while I pride myself in being able to explain technical things to less-technically-inclined people, I've never had the slightest clue on how to get people to _think_ in that sort of fashion, even for people who do well with logic outside of the computer realm.

I imagine that early exposure helps, though, in my case, it might have been due to exposure to so many other things, including being around autistic people.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
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Adept wrote to Dr. What <=-

That _does_ make sense, though that sort of thing is so hard --
teaching _is_ a skill, so it kind of becomes like training an astronaut
to drill, or teaching drillers to be an astronaut.

It certainly does take a special kind of person to be a good teacher.

I've known colleges that recruit teachers from the corporate world. They teach for a few years, then rotate back into the corporate world. They may not be the best teachers, but they do have more knowledge than a teacher who has never had a "real job".

The problem that I saw when in college then in corporate is that the culture in academia is very different than corporate and they really don't prepare you for that. And for geeky people, that prepartion would have been very useful.

repair logic skills. And with those skills I started doing tech support
at least by 5th grade when I got called out of a class to fix a
computer.

When I was in high school, there was such a huge demand for learning computers that the continuing education recruited us to teach the elementary school kids.

They were bored until I told them that they could program the computer to do their math homework. They had so much fun that they didn't realize that they worked harder to write that program than the would have done just doing the homework.

And, while I pride myself in being able to explain technical things to less-technically-inclined people, I've never had the slightest clue on
how to get people to _think_ in that sort of fashion, even for people
who do well with logic outside of the computer realm.

And I found that you can't get people to think in certain ways. The best you can do is explain things in many different ways, hoping that one will stick.

Some people just aren't going to "get it".


... Take my advice, I don't use it anyway.
___ MultiMail/Linux v0.52

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They may not be the best teachers, but they do have more knowledge than
a teacher who has never had a "real job".

It does seem like something that might be ideal as guest lecturers of some sort.

But always kind of hard to say what would be best, at least without lots of well-designed studies.

And who knows how one _tests_ for such things.

don't prepare you for that. And for geeky people, that prepartion would have been very useful.

True, though I'm not sure how much I understood the _academic_ world. But I'm probably not the best example, as I've never had too much of a problem with being able to understand people, or how to communicate in different situations.

Sure, plenty of other issues, but my geekiness in growing up was that I spent a lot of time on BBSing message boards, while my brother spent a lot of time in the file section or the various other things that didn't involve random people as much.

They were bored until I told them that they could program the computer
to do their math homework. They had so much fun that they didn't
realize that they worked harder to write that program than the would
have done just doing the homework.

Neat! I do remember, in my Physics class, where we could put stuff onto the calculator as notes for whatever we were doing.

So I wrote a program for a particular set of problems, which, of course, meant that I knew the formula _really_ well, rather than it being remotely useful as a cheat sheet.

Did keep me from making calculation mistakes on the test, though, I'm sure.

And, on the teaching side of things, I was a guest in a high school Computer Science class where the students spent a couple of weeks making a theme for library self checkouts, where I gave them instructions on how, but they made all the files and whatnot, that I eventually put on the self checkouts.

I think it was well-received. Or at least they liked it enough that they made some neat things.

And I found that you can't get people to think in certain ways. The
best you can do is explain things in many different ways, hoping that
one will stick.

Yeah. Best to meet people where they are, and hopefully add to their tree of knowledge given the branches that they already have.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
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Adept wrote to Dr. What <=-

It does seem like something that might be ideal as guest lecturers of
some sort.

Now that's a good idea.

But always kind of hard to say what would be best, at least without
lots of well-designed studies.

And who knows how one _tests_ for such things.

But I don't think we need to test for that. Let me give an example.

In college, one of my classes we had to write a text editor. On Monday, the prof gave us the specs. Every other class or so, he would change the specs - just a bit - or add another small requirement (scope creep). At the end, he told us why he did it that way - to simulate what you will have to deal with on the job.

And he was pretty much right. But such stuff wasn't on the test. But that wasn't important. What was important was to make us understand that we will almost never get 100% complete/correct specs at the start of the project and things will change "in flight."

But that was the only class that did something like that.

Neat! I do remember, in my Physics class, where we could put stuff onto the calculator as notes for whatever we were doing.

In college, I programmed up my TRS-80 PC-4 to do the Newton/Raphson root finding method. We actually covered it in class, which inspired me to write the program. On a test, the prof watched me use it. He asked me a few quiet questions about it and said "Neat!" and walked away. I think he was impressed that I actually applied something he taught.

So I wrote a program for a particular set of problems, which, of
course, meant that I knew the formula _really_ well, rather than it
being remotely useful as a cheat sheet.

I did the same thing for Chemistry class in high school. My classmates said "The teacher won't accept the printout". But he did - along with the source code for the BASIC program I wrote. He then said I didn't have to do the homework for this anymore because if I could teach a computer how to do it, I must have mastered the concept.


... Sigmund's wife wore Freudian slips.
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On 09 Feb 2024 at 04:42p, Adept pondered and said...

They may not be the best teachers, but they do have more knowledge th a teacher who has never had a "real job".

It does seem like something that might be ideal as guest lecturers of
some sort.

Such a thing exists; at least at the collegiate level.
That's precisely what adjunct professors are supposed
to be: people with relevant domain experience who assist
with _teaching_ at the college level. Often these
people have lots of industry experience and quite
possibly advanced degrees in the field. I've taught a
few classes that way (at MIT and NYU; both CS).

Sadly, the adjunct system is now being abused to provide
low-wage teaching labor in universities where tenure track
faculty don't want to do it, or where there just aren't
enough full-time faculty to meet the teaching demand, and
the administration doesn't want to great new positions.

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the prof gave us the specs. Every other class or so, he would change
the specs - just a bit - or add another small requirement (scope creep). At the end, he told us why he did it that way - to simulate what you
will have to deal with on the job.

Yeah, that does seem like an excellent way to expose you to something that's more real-world like.

Though, in school, I remember switching IDE, language, code repository, and probably lots of other things with each different set of classes, so by the time things became requirement creep it just seemed like, "okay, someone else has another set of requirements for us to deal with".

But, yeah, not _quite_ the same, since theoretically the professor gave enough information at the beginning to know the final outcome.

I did the same thing for Chemistry class in high school. My classmates said "The teacher won't accept the printout". But he did - along with
the source code for the BASIC program I wrote. He then said I didn't
have to do the homework for this anymore because if I could teach a computer how to do it, I must have mastered the concept.

Nifty! This reminds me of the Philosophy of Logic class that I took (and really enjoyed) where, as a final project sort of thing, the professor gave us a group project where we'd have to solve a 12-variable (or something like that) logic thing, determining which variables were true or false.

And he said something along the lines of it being much too complicated to brute force the answer.

But it was not remotely complicated for a computer, so my groupmate wrote a program that tried all possibilities, printed out all the possibilities, and highlighted the correct solution.

And then I took that knowledge, assumed the known-false conclusion and worked until I got a contradiction, and worked my way through the variables without worrying about going down any wrong paths.

We handed in the printout along with the logic, but it just got a question mark or something on it, so I think we just confused the professor. But someone used to humans doing logic things is going to have a different idea of what's possible to brute force than someone who thinks it through with a computer.

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Adept wrote to Dr. What <=-

Though, in school, I remember switching IDE, language, code repository, and probably lots of other things with each different set of classes,
so by the time things became requirement creep it just seemed like,
"okay, someone else has another set of requirements for us to deal
with".

But, yeah, not _quite_ the same, since theoretically the professor gave enough information at the beginning to know the final outcome.

Closer to the real world than you might think. Especially if the tech lead of the project suffers from neophilia.

I remember knowing some people who worked for K-Mart (IT dept) and one of their big problems was that they'd get a manager who decided to go "this way" with tech. They'd buy hardware, software, start to get trained, etc. Then that manager would move on and they'd get another mananger who would say "This way is wrong. We need to go that way." and the whole cycle of hardware, software, training would start over again.

It's no wonder why their IT dept stayed in the 70's so long.

We handed in the printout along with the logic, but it just got a
question mark or something on it, so I think we just confused the professor. But someone used to humans doing logic things is going to
have a different idea of what's possible to brute force than someone
who thinks it through with a computer.

Kinda make me think that that college needed to take a page from Dartmouth and their BASIC program. It got a very high percentage of people involved in computers - and not just the one going into computers.



... Circular Definition: see Definition, Circular.
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Closer to the real world than you might think. Especially if the tech lead of the project suffers from neophilia.

"We want to use the blockchain!"

No, you don't.

"We want to replace everyone with AI!"

Nope, still a bad idea.

Yeah, it does seem like that, with a variety of things. It's not even that blockchain and AI are "bad" technologies; just that you need to know what they're good at, what they're bad at, and which of those things are true now but may not be true later.

And if it fits the industry.

Obviously, with K-Mart, it wasn't blockchain or AI that would've been the issue. And we're mostly talking about business people. For tech people, honestly, while it's exhausting to be changing things all the time, it's also pretty exciting to be trying new things all the time.

It's no wonder why their IT dept stayed in the 70's so long.

The other problem is that something that already works is generally going to outperform something that might be better, but will have teething problems. Sticking in the 70s is fine for a lot of things.

Kinda make me think that that college needed to take a page from
Dartmouth and their BASIC program. It got a very high percentage of people involved in computers - and not just the one going into computers.

Yeah, that makes sense. And, honestly, anything that increases general computer literacy is probably a net positive for most everyone. If all your Political Science majors gain some basic tech understanding, maybe the next generation of lawyers and politicians will be that much more likely to understand some technical topic that's pertinent.

I'm not _sure_ it mattered for a philosophy of logic class, since I'm not sure if the topic has changed much, realistically, in the past century.

Though, on that note, if memory serves, this philosophy of logic class was a prereq for other philosophy classes. I'm not sure if I _took_ any other philosophy classes, but I really enjoyed philosophy of logic and doubt I would've much enjoyed general philosophy classes.

Since, with philosophy of logic you can go, "okay, do you accept these assumptions? Then this is true. If you'd like to continue arguing, please tell me which assumption you want to change.".

With general philosophy, "I think, therefore I am" is controversial enough that we ended up with, "I exist" and "there are thoughts", and everything else people are still arguing about.

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Adept wrote to Dr. What <=-

Obviously, with K-Mart, it wasn't blockchain or AI that would've been
the issue. And we're mostly talking about business people. For tech people, honestly, while it's exhausting to be changing things all the time, it's also pretty exciting to be trying new things all the time.

Trying out new things and basing a production system around something untried are two different things.

I've experienced too much pain where we had a developer who decided New Tech X was cool and then built a critical production process around it. Never mind that no one else on the team was interested in New Tech X, didn't know New Tech X and New Tech X didn't do a much better job than the current tech.

The other problem is that something that already works is generally
going to outperform something that might be better, but will have
teething problems. Sticking in the 70s is fine for a lot of things.

It depends. This was the 1990's and they were running on hardware and software that was way past end of life. Now that's not a real big problem. Many companies out there will support you - for an arm, a leg and your first born. But that's usually a good indication that you should be moving on. And they were trying to do that, they just kept derailing themselves.


... First, they tax incomes; now they're taxing my patience.
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Re: Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
By: Dr. What to Adept on Wed Feb 14 2024 08:15:24

Hi, Dr. What.

I've experienced too much pain where we had a developer who decided New Tech X was cool and then built a critical production process around it. Never mind that no one else on the team was interested in New Tech X, didn't know New Tech X and New Tech X didn't do a much better job than the current tech.

Oh, yes. A hundred times... and usually said dev then leaves the company and nobody can maintain this completely bespoke thing they left behind with no documentation!

As one of my university lecturers used to say - there's a difference between being clever and being smart...

BobW
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Bob Worm wrote to Dr. What <=-

Oh, yes. A hundred times... and usually said dev then leaves the
company and nobody can maintain this completely bespoke thing they left behind with no documentation!

This happened a lot in my previous company. I spent countless hours de-clever-ing things that were made by people who didn't stay to maintain them.

As one of my university lecturers used to say - there's a difference between being clever and being smart...

And he's right on.


... I'd love to, but my bathroom tiles need grouting.
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I've experienced too much pain where we had a developer who decided New Tech X was cool and then built a critical production process around it. Never mind that no one else on the team was interested in New Tech X, didn't know New Tech X and New Tech X didn't do a much better job than
the current tech.

Yeah, shiny new things. Though, also, it's generally more fun building something up yourself than figuring out what the heck the last twenty people were doing with this code that's supposedly self-commenting.

problem. Many companies out there will support you - for an arm, a leg and your first born. But that's usually a good indication that you
should be moving on. And they were trying to do that, they just kept derailing themselves.

Makes sense. So, yeah, they did need to move on to something else, but they needed to actually make a choice and follow through on it, regardless of what the choice was.

Though a large amount of tech projects fail, regardless. Just hard to get it right.

But if your program looks like NASA's rocket building after the Space Shuttle, there may be too many bosses, changing too often, to get a good outcome in a reasonable amount of time.

(That one shouldn't be too political; it takes time to build a space program, and if each president wants to put their stamp on things and have a bold new vision, that winds up meaning that the bold new vision will cancel out much of the previous work. Presumably the effect would be the same at Kmart.)

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I used to read "Programming Pearls" in the back issues of the Journal the ACM back in college and had picked up the book. Sadly, I let it a long time ago.

I think you meant Communications of the ACM; JACM is mostly
theory. :-)

I get Communications of the ACM, and it doesn't seem to have Programming Pearls, at this point in time.

Which means _nothing_ for this discussion, but it sounds like an interesting column.

Though Communications of the ACM is still interesting, though I'm not sure I've found any of it to be useful, practically, at this point.

Or, heck, not sure how useful my ACM membership has been, but I like being a part of it, regardless.

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C++ (not C) appears to be the collegiate programming language of choice these days. It was Java for a while, C before that, Pascal before that, and FORTRAN before that.

I guess I'm about 5 years removed from the experience, but I remember having classes that used Java, C++, C++11, C Sharp, some form of assembly (I'm struggling on remembering what languages we used in my embedded systems class, but it was more than one), and probably one or two things besides that.

It really did seem like there was a new language with every course. I don't specifically remember Python, but wouldn't be surprised if I forgot about when I first used it.

But I was not experiencing the intro-to-programming level with all these courses, as I had done that in my undergrad, some years earlier. And, at this point, I'm not entirely sure if it was Java or C++.

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the rest of the research community). So Communications
used to have a lot of papers that were kind of systems-y,
but much less these days. Communications nowadays is
more like a magazine.

It does seem to have a mix of things that seem like research papers and a variety of opinion articles about the computer issues of the day and the ethical way to approach them as computer professionals.

It's also kinda fun seeing things from Vinton G. Cerf. Regardless of the topic.

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Ya, I let my membership lapse because they were moving away from computer technology and getting into more social-issues-and-stuff.

I do tend to skip over the ethics articles. Since I tend to be more interested in the scientific aspect of, "well, what's possible?", and I'm absolutely the sort of person who would not think about "if we should", because that's more of a political question, to me.

Well, I probably _would_ think of "if we should", but more in the context of what should be allowed as business practice, rather than scientific progress.

But, thankfully, I tend to find the various, "what should be the ethical stance of computer people on x?" articles more boring than contentious.

And I haven't been tasked with implementing a system that I find unethical, thankfully.

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Adept wrote to Dr. What <=-

Yeah, shiny new things. Though, also, it's generally more fun building something up yourself than figuring out what the heck the last twenty people were doing with this code that's supposedly self-commenting.

I've dealt with (and still deal with) some developers who have an attitude of "I don't need to document it. It's self-evident." Ya, to you, who did the research and wrote it. But it's greek to someone else who didn't.

But changing someone else's code is 90% of what developers do. It doesn't take too long for you to write good code when you get a chance to do the other 10% and write new stuff. Because you may be the person maintaining it in 5 years.

There's nothing like the revelation that the horrible, uncommented, hard to read, hard to understand code that you are complaining about was written by you a few years ago.


... Would you like to have some pizza with that sausage?
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Adept wrote to tenser <=-

I get Communications of the ACM, and it doesn't seem to have
Programming Pearls, at this point in time.

I think the Programming Pearls column was gone back in the late 1980's. But there were other, similar, columns for a while.

Which means _nothing_ for this discussion, but it sounds like an interesting column.

It was interesting enough to spawn off 2 books. :)

Though Communications of the ACM is still interesting, though I'm not
sure I've found any of it to be useful, practically, at this point.

For my magazines, I use a 3 issue test: When the renewal comes up, I look through the last 3 issues. If I can easily find at least 1 article that I want to keep for a long time, I renew. If not, it's not worth my money.

Or, heck, not sure how useful my ACM membership has been, but I like
being a part of it, regardless.

I used to think the same way. Even ignoring my 3 month test. But it reached a point that, for me, I really didn't want to be associated with it anymore. And I had to give up my acm.org email address that I had for ages.


... Every silver lining has a cloud around it.
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I've dealt with (and still deal with) some developers who have an
attitude of "I don't need to document it. It's self-evident." Ya, to you, who did the research and wrote it. But it's greek to someone else who didn't.

Yeah. This is also why I have problems with the various code style things that are anti-comments.

Because I want comments to tell me what was in the developer's head at the time the things were made. Yeah, it _might_ not be updated, but it'll help me more quickly understand the edge cases, or why the section exists at all.

And then I _also_ don't have to figure out if some well-named variable means what I think it means, or _almost_ what I think it means, because theoretically the comment explained the concept well.

But my code tends to start with comments, slowly expand out to be a ton of comments with some amount of code, then less code and slightly-more-than-I-started-with amount of comments.

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For my magazines, I use a 3 issue test: When the renewal comes up, I look through the last 3 issues. If I can easily find at least 1 article that
I want to keep for a long time, I renew. If not, it's not worth my
money.

I guess I don't know how many articles I wind up wanting to keep for a long time in any magazine.

Especially if I were to look at a news magazine or something.

The retro gaming stuff I get, sure, even though I'm bad about actually reading them.

I used to think the same way. Even ignoring my 3 month test. But it reached a point that, for me, I really didn't want to be associated with it anymore.

I guess that makes sense. I think, for me, there's some aspect of, "this is the sort of thing that I'd like to have some idea of what this group of people is thinking is important", and it's a more-reliable level of quality than random web sites might be. And has better incentives / is less likely to be addictive for me.

it anymore. And I had to give up my acm.org email address that I had
for ages.

And you actually _used_ it?

I think it's been a long while since I used an e-mail address that I didn't control, aside from gmail and yahoo addresses, which I've tended to use as either throwaways, or because it's effectively something that is connected to the gmail account directly.

Or I'm worried that my personal domain is getting e-mails sent to spam folders. But I long ago went away from having e-mail connected to things that other people control, because they tend not to have my interests at the front of their mind. Including remembering having a bigfoot.com once upon a time, that was supposed to be a "permanent" address, where you'd just have it redirect to a different address as you switched ISPs.

But, obviously, they didn't last, or their service didn't, so it was far from permanent.

But my domains? They're basically as permanent as I am, which is probably as good as it gets for me.

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Adept wrote to Dr. What <=-

it anymore. And I had to give up my acm.org email address that I had
for ages.

And you actually _used_ it?

It was very useful because it was just an email forwarding system. So I could easly change the back end email provider while keeping my email address the same.

Or I'm worried that my personal domain is getting e-mails sent to spam folders. But I long ago went away from having e-mail connected to
things that other people control, because they tend not to have my interests at the front of their mind.

That's why I don't use my gmail account anymore. But setting up my own domain, email server, etc. was just too much work to be of value to me. I did locate a service that I seems to be trustworthy (so far). It's pay, of course, which helps to push it to the more trustworthy category.


... We have no solution, but we sure admire the problem.
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That's why I don't use my gmail account anymore. But setting up my own domain, email server, etc. was just too much work to be of value to me.
I did locate a service that I seems to be trustworthy (so far). It's
pay, of course, which helps to push it to the more trustworthy category.

Seems reasonable.

For me, I've been hosting my own e-mail for so long that it'd be more effort to do something else.

I don't mean _actually_ hosting my own e-mail, as that's a terrible idea; just using MxRoute to do the hosting for a whole host of e-mail addresses, including hosting my mom's e-mail. So she gets to have an address with her name in it, hopefully without too much hassle for anyone.

And, while I think pretty highly of MxRoute (they've had a variety of times where they've gone, "we don't think we did well enough, here, so everyone on this server gets an extra year of service" or "Well, we're synchronizing things, which means that we push back the end date of what you paid for", and the service already doesn't cost that much.), if they _did_ go under, it'd be painful for a bit, but after a few days I'd have all the same e-mail addresses, just hosted on a different server.

But, yeah, probably less work to just sign up for a forwarding service.

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On 16 Feb 2024 at 02:30p, Adept pondered and said...

I used to read "Programming Pearls" in the back issues of the Jo the ACM back in college and had picked up the book. Sadly, I le a long time ago.

I think you meant Communications of the ACM; JACM is mostly
theory. :-)

I get Communications of the ACM, and it doesn't seem to have Programming Pearls, at this point in time.

Which means _nothing_ for this discussion, but it sounds like an interesting column.

It was. Programming Pearls was a regular column published
in CACM by Jon Bentley; he collected the contents into two
books, "Programming Pearls" and "More Programming Pearls."
Both were interesting, though the former has more widely
applicable to more situations than the latter.

The first volume was given a second edition sometime in the
early 2000s; I talked to Dennis Ritchie about it briefly
before it was published; we were talking about something
else and he happened to mention that Bentley had some new
material and was discussing things like cache effects. Some
of the content from "More" was rolled into the 2nd edition,
but the second volume has never been updated.

Both are, in my opinion, still worth a read. The profiler
written in `awk` was pretty cool.

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Re: Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
By: Dr. What to Adept on Tue Feb 20 2024 07:48 am

That's why I don't use my gmail account anymore. But setting up my own doma email server, etc. was just too much work to be of value to me. I did locat service that I seems to be trustworthy (so far). It's pay, of course, which helps to push it to the more trustworthy category.

Running a personal email service is not that hard these days. Nowadays you can just install your favourite Linux or BSD, run some pre-made script, and watch it deploy a full email server with a fancy administration interface for you.

The only "hard" (for a very lazy definition of "hard") is then getting your DNS records right.

For the record, this month's Admin: Networks & Security magazine comes with a review for iRedMail, which is an email appliance that lets you run your own email service without having to think too much about the deployment.

--
gopher://gopher.richardfalken.com/1/richardfalken
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On a Prodigy(sp?) CD years ago was a C- - Program and I think some instructions for C - - too.

I played with it some but didn't get fluent(sp?) using it.

NOW C=64 BASIC and IBM DOS 2.11 BASIC I DUG.

YEP!, I'm one of those...
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I liked the Tagline about XEROX Alto You used.

Here I am typing on a Android Phone and can't STEAL that Tagline.

Now on my XP PC the Tagline File is HUGE!!!!!!!!!!

Why isn't Multimail available in the APP Files on this thing.

Sometimes I have to "Praise The Lord ANYHOW".
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I liked the Tagline about XEROX Alto You used.

Thanks.

Why isn't Multimail available in the APP Files on this thing.
Sometimes I have to "Praise The Lord ANYHOW".

I keep this tagline unique to 20-4-BEERS when I post from here.
I saw list of taglines when I posted for the first time and had a thought "gosh.. another huge list of generic, boring and quite often lame taglines".

So I'd killed all of them and at that time I was inspired by some documentary movie about XEROX Parp and how everybody stole from its prime ideas and how XEROX actually failed to monetize on its R&D.

I'd considered this was brilliant idea to remind myself that not the inventors.. but sales force capable organizations win.. always.

especially when I think I can invent something worth sharing :)

-h1

... Xerox Alto was the thing. Anything after we use is just a mere copy.

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The history I remember reading said the same.
That's why I made the comment about the Tagline You used.
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The Tagline "Albatetize the Alphabet" brought to mind this:

ZYXW VUTS RQ PONML KJIH GFED CBA

Those spaces between the backward Alphabet mean pause(s).

On a good day I can say the above in 3 point 5 seconds.

I have to admit I have been beat two times by girls who were in the 8th Grade.

I learned the alphabet backwards by typing the alphabet and then looking at the character on the right side, typing that character (z).
Looking at the character to the left of the last typed character and typing it (y), and so on, so on until I typed (a).
Then all I had to do then was look at the reversed line and repeat typing it, OVER AND OVER.

Worked for me.

I have to confess when saying the reversed alphabet out loud, at first (for many. many months), as I said each character my fingers twitched.
Little finger on left hand, first finger on right hand, third finger on left hand, third finger on left hand... etc.
For: zyxw.....

Hope this tale was enjoyed by those reading it.

It's the truth, it's actual, everything is satisfactual.
Zippy-de-do-dah.......
BTW de-do-dah doesn't mean a sublimital message in Morse Code.

How's that for a Tagline?
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Ed Vance wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

The Tagline "Albatetize the Alphabet" brought to mind this:

ZYXW VUTS RQ PONML KJIH GFED CBA

Those spaces between the backward Alphabet mean pause(s).

On a good day I can say the above in 3 point 5 seconds.

There's a culty little film called "Tapeheads" from the 1990s starring
Tim Robbins and John Cusack as out of work security guards who become
music video directors.

In one scene, they're at their local watering hole, looking for another
round of drinks, when the bartender tells them he's required to give a
sobriety test. He asks them to sign the alphabet in ASL, backwards,
skipping the vowels. They walk through it like that's something people
do all the time. Odd, absurd, and funny.

https://youtu.be/Ku_wLVbIUA4?si=B_bSulJDadhtqBeY&t=120


... Adding on
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On a Prodigy(sp?) CD years ago was a C- - Program and I
think some instructions for C - - too.

I remember seeing Sphinx C-- around in the 90s, I don't think I ever actually learned it though. By then I probably acquired a copy of Turbo C++ 3 from a friend. Looks like Sphinx C-- is still around: https://bkhome.org/archive/goosee/cmm/

NOW C=64 BASIC and IBM DOS 2.11 BASIC I DUG.

I totally missed the C64 era but DOS 2.11 / BASIC era was all mine! Our Tandy 100HX had MS-DOS 2.11 in ROM which I still think is one of the coolest features in a PC from that era - it booted so fast, and without a boot disk! And programming in GW-BASIC, or IBM BASIC(A), was absolutely where I got hooked on computers! I remember seeing BASIC code and thinking "these are English words, I can understand this!" was fantastic. Though of course it was the surface-level stuff like PRINT and GOTO that came so easy - I never did develop REAL expertise in BASIC. It was a fantastic launch pad into computer programming though!


Chris/akacastor

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