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[psonnek@pro-algonquin.cts.com (Patrick Sonnek)]

Just a general comment on the HLL/Assembly debate.

Quite frankly I agree with the person who said that HLL's permit sloppy
design and coding.  In assembler you have to do it right or it wont work. a
lot of HLL's are more forgiving.  The higher the level of the HLL, the less
sofisticated(sp) the programmer needs to be to use it.  This is good for
buisness, because they can hire less expensive programmers.  
The down side to this, is that tight, well thought out, logic, that is
efficent with memory, disk access, and cpu cycles, (i.e. FAST and SMALL) is
learned the hard way on clumsy Lower level langauges.
I've seen programs written in 4th Generation Languages (4GLs) that work,
but they chew up so many resources that user complain about how long the
process takes, and there is not many resources left for the other
processes.  This programer was a fresh out of college "green horn"  I'm not
sure if the ink was even dry on his deploma yet.  I took the program,
rewrote it from scratch (in the same 4GL, I didn't have a choice) and
improved the performance by 70%.

I guess what I'm trying to say, is that HLL's are usefull, but to write
good code, you still need to be a PROGRAMMER, not just a dabbler.  and a
programmer should be well versed in assembler, on some computer, just so
that person has a feel for how the computer works, what it's capable of
doing, and more importantly, what it's not capable of doing.

One last note for you BS/MS/PhD's in comp.sci who will feel the need to
flame my archaic/backwards way of thinking;
1. go get a job in corperate america
2. send all flames to dev/null
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