On Nov 4, 6:40 pm, "Michael J. Mahon"<mjma...@aol.com> wrote:
I never met a hardware engineer who, in response to a particularly
elusive bug, began to suspect errant electrons or quantum fluctuations.
;-) They are pretty clear that 999 times out of 1000, their logic is
the source of their problem. (That doesn't mean that very occasionally
something like cosmic ray-induced single-event upsets didn't turn out to
be implicated ultimately. ;-)
:-) When I was studying, the field of "Software Engineering" tended to
be regarded by the engineering fraternity somewhere on a spectrum from
good-hearted mockery to scarcely concealed contempt, depending on the
engineer and how much beer they'd just had...
Now that programmable logic is prevalent in the hardware community and
they're reliving most of the software worlds mistakes, it's difficult
to resist the temptation to throw back the odd ironic jibe. Discipline
it seems, is much easier to maintain in a world with 'hard'
constraints ;-)
Sometimes I muse about a possible future where what we now call a CPU
is just a bag of fast ram and a programmable gate array. Part of me is
intrigued by the possibilities of dynamically configurable instruction
sets and the compilers that might drive them.
The other part goes white with fear, the blood drains to its boots,
and it screams out in horror. Then I remember who'se side I'm *really*
on :-)