On 06/07/2016 02:03 PM, Bill Sudbrink via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
It's a bit astonishing to me too. We get job candidates with CS degrees from reputable universities who don't know what a register is, can't explain how basic sorts work or why you would even want to know. In my opinion, the most evil phrase to come out of a software engineer's mouth is "I don't want to have to think about...". Yup, it's all abstracted away. You get a "container class" with "iterators" and "find" methods and you're all set. Not fast enough? Throw more hardware at it.
This is raising my blood pressure... gotta stop.
I know exactly how you feel. The shift toward this type of thinking has been building for a long time. It's exactly why I moved entirely into embedded systems development, where we still code in assembler a lot of the time, and we still know how computers actually work and how code actually gets executed. And for people who think this shift is a "good thing": Bullshit. This is the sort of "progress" that landed us in a position where an operating system requires billions of bytes of RAM just to boot. Get some perspective and look at the bigger picture. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA