Re: Low-level vs. High-level programming (was My First Computer)

["Kevin Lawton" <kepla@btinternet.com>]

vector <root@localhost> wrote:
| "White Flame (aka David Holz)" <whiteflame52@y.a.h.o.o.com> wrote in
| message news:b3qo6h$5ar$1@barad-dur.nas.com...
|| "Really" <barryem@yahoo.com> wrote in message
|| 1c7cf088462765c2a0e63c17ceaa1ece@news.teranews.com">news:1c7cf088462765c2a0e63c17ceaa1ece@news.teranews.com...
||| Through a 35 year programming career (I'm retired now) there was
||| never a month where something didn't make me very glad to have that
||| assembly experience, even though I never actually used assembly
||| during some years.
||
|| Though I've only had a 10 year programming career (20 years of
|| programming experience) doing very high-level code, I can fully
|| agree.  You don't technically *need* to know low-level concepts in
|| order to create working code, but it certainly helps you do it
|| *well*, as well as helps in debugging and optimization.  When doing
|| wavelet graphics on a 68k Palm for a web browser, I did it all in
|| C++, but continually looked at the generated assembly code and
|| massaged the code to produce the optimum asm code from the compiler,
|| knowing how it works.
|
| Here's a fun quote from a Microsoft employee speaking of Visual
| Studio .NET at a seminar I attended: "The more we can lower the bar,
| the better we can enforce good coding practices."

Sounds like typical M$ plonker-speak to me.   :-)
Quite how was this guy thinking ?

| I was both sickened and awed by the very idea that MS, by way of this
| guy's statement, had essentially told me I am too stupid to be
| trusted to be a programmer.

I, too, am a reluctant user of recent high-level languages - having worked
at first on assembler and then C. Fast, efficient, compact programs just
don't seem to be the aim of programmers anymore. How else could you explain
Java ?

| Worse, were I to replace "I am" with "the IT industry is" in the above
| sentence, I'd actually agree with that statement right now.  I think
| that's directly from where IT's current slump comes: normal people
| (i.e., non-nerds) who were attracted to programming as a career
| because they didn't want to be doctors or lawyers anymore, but just
| didn't have the mindset for it.  At the core of all the layoffs,
| downsizing, shakedowns, whatever, I think we're witnessing the
| computer industry shake off the burden of having hired these people
| that thought computer programming meant f��ball-tables, Sprite, and
| snowboarding all day.

Unfortunately, the industry also managed to shake off several of us who can
work in assembler and dump-crack when required.
Unfortunately, 'progress' doesn't always seem to be accompanied by
'improvement'.