31–40 of 175 posts
In 1997 I was doing an apprenticeship. It had a very well organized curriculum and well thought courses. One course was based on 8080/8085 cpu. You know what they gave us: A development board (roughly the size of a modern mainboard) with onboard hex keyboard 0-9a-f and 3-4 function keys (halt, run, write at ... something like that). And a book and templated paper. So the exercises, 3-4 hours every week, were: Impleme…
And of course, "The rise of 'Worse is Better'": https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs240/old/sp2014/readings/wor...
Strangely enough, it's more modern, but many of the concepts mentioned may be more alien to young programmers. How many will know what's meant by keypunch? Timesharing? RATFOR? Listings? The email address in the header?
BTW, the title (and text) refers to the book "Real men don't eat quiche", a pastiche of the genre that would later bring produce the weirdly unironic classic "Women are from Venus, Men are from Mars".
Sadly we have strayed to the other extreme. From "every instruction is precious" right over to, "who cares how many instructions I use?" Nowadays, desktop apps which started in an instant 20 years ago, seem to take several seconds even before they are even doing anything useful like loading a project or whatever. Even things like Visual Studio looking through the MRU project list can take 10 seconds (probably a threa…
The developer time is saved by not writing multiple apps, fuck the end user, who cares about their time? Seriously, I have to really think about when was the last time there wasn't some degree of unnecessary friction in an application. It really feels like being an end user of modern tech is like being in an abusive relationship.
I've come to realize that a lot of modern developers consider users of their tech to be little more than cattle. The tech is cattle feed, meant to fatten and ensnare the user, so they can be sold off and slaughtered.
There's really only one party in that kind of relationship that benefits.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The developer time is saved by not writing multiple apps, fuck the end user, who cares about their time? Seriously, I have to really think about when was the last time there wasn't some degree of unnecessary friction in an application. It really feels like being an end user of modern tech is like being in an abusive relationship.
> It really feels like being an end user of modern tech is like being in an abusive relationship. I've come to realize that a lot of modern developers consider users of their tech to be little more than cattle. The tech is cattle feed, meant to fatten and ensnare the user, so they can be sold off and slaughtered. There's really only one party in that kind of relationship that benefits.
At first programmers were able to resist all that and have a voice, but lately it seems that the only prestige we retained was the salary, so we must play the same tune as the rest of the band. Agile was an attempt at being "self managed" and have a bit more independence, but that was also corrupted and lots of devs hate it with a passion too, so we're mostly back to practicing non-iterative, Steve-Jobsian-gut-feeling-centric development. Programmers have bought into that toxic mentality too.
And even in better situations, such as my current job, the tasks that cause the most issues, take more developer time and annoy the user the most are always the same: non-idiomatic features (for the web or for desktop apps), often concocted by designers totally disconnected with the audience, who at most did two or three "interviews" where the user said "yeah I could see myself using that".
In 1997 I was doing an apprenticeship. It had a very well organized curriculum and well thought courses. One course was based on 8080/8085 cpu. You know what they gave us: A development board (roughly the size of a modern mainboard) with onboard hex keyboard 0-9a-f and 3-4 function keys (halt, run, write at ... something like that). And a book and templated paper. So the exercises, 3-4 hours every week, were: Impleme…
Bonus trivia: those "Raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers"? Those would not have been the 0-9a-f we're familiar with today, but 0-9fgjkqw[1]! [1]: http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/lgp-30-man.html#R4.13
That’s how it was explained to me in 1973 by Mr. Willoughby, a math teacher who also taught Computer Programming in my high school. We didn’t actually have an LGP30, but he had learned on one, and graded our programs handed in written on paper.
Fortunately, this was only for the first half of the class; after we learned this machine language, we graduated to a higher-level language, Neat3, for the NCR (yes, the cash register company) Century 100, one of which the school district did own. Subsequent assignments were handed in on punchcards and actually compiled and run. By the teacher. After school. So you’d get back your compile error the next day, or if you were more fortunate, your output. If your program compiled and ran and gave the right answer the first time, you’d get a grade of 100. Then 97, 94, 91, etc. It was quite the motivation for carefully planning things out ahead of time.
And his reason for starting with machine language? “Well, you can’t expect anyone to understand what’s really going on in higher-level languages if you don’t know what’s happening underneath, right?” Worked for me.
I have often felt that programming is an art form,
whose real value can only be appreciated
by another versed in the same arcane art;
there are lovely gems and brilliant coups
hidden from human view and admiration, sometimes forever,
by the very nature of the process.All of his other presentations are great too and definitely worth a listen if you like this sort of thing [2]. A couple of my favorites are “Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of Illumos” [3] and “Debugging Under Fire: Keep your Head when Systems have Lost their Mind” [4].
[1]: https://youtu.be/4PaWFYm0kEw?t=644
[2]: http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2018/02/03/talks/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've never heard of this. Was this just a quirk of the LGP-30?
Probably not. Look at your keyboard. Those are the keys on the right side of the home row. They probably used them because it was easier and quicker to type than 'abcdef'.
Why would you want that alongside numbers which are either two rows up or to the side?
Unless the keyboard was something like USPS’s which has numbers as an alternate mode on the home row, and thus made this layout sensible? But that would still make it a quirk of the system.
Edit: yeah it was absolutely a quirk of the LPG-30, per a sibling comment: http://laboratorium.net/archive/2008/04/28/a_few_facts_about...