Date: Tue, 30 Sep 1997 19:40:17 +0200 From: Peter Korsten <peter@grendel.IAEhv.nl> To: chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Microsoft brainrot (was: r-cmds and DNS and /etc/host.conf) Message-ID: <19970930194016.61484@grendel.IAEhv.nl> In-Reply-To: <199709300039.UAA27996@melange.gnu.ai.mit.edu>; from Joel N. Weber II on Mon, Sep 29, 1997 at 08:39:05PM -0400 References: <19970930004017.44751@grendel.IAEhv.nl> <199709300039.UAA27996@melange.gnu.ai.mit.edu>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Joel N. Weber II shared with us: > You're more of a designer > than an actual programmer. There are other people that are better > in that, like, well, us. You don't need a computer in the designing > phase. > > I don't think that computer science necissarily teaches good design, > either. > > At least, none of the computer courses at my high school seem to teach > it adaquately. You can't learn the principals involved in writing a big > program from looking at toy problems that are no longer than a hundred > lines each. It's sort of silly watching a teacher explain how to break > Pascal programs of 50 lines into several procedures. For a program that > short, you can't see the value of procedures. When you're writing a > 15000 line program, you start to see the use of breaking up a program > like that. That's why I want to call it 'computing science' instead of 'computer science'. The problems in a 15000 lines program are not more difficult than those in a 150 line program. It's just more of them. The problems I'm talking about are more mathematical problems than 'how do I tell my 747 not to drop down' or something similar. But any real-world problem can be abstracted to one or several mathe- matical problem. Of course, you need a sound foundation for large projects, but it's more important how you organize your data and the associated methods (yes, I like object-oriented programming) that how you do so with actual code. Like Edsger W. Dijkstra once said: "data structures + algorithms = programming". (Please shoot me if I misquoted him.) - Peter
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?19970930194016.61484>