Re: Java

From: Edward G. Nilges (spinoza1111_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 04/01/04 

Date: 31 Mar 2004 17:42:13 -0800

gswork@mailcity.com (gswork) wrote in message news:<81f33a98.0403302349.18d9e01b@posting.google.com>...
> Randy Howard <randyhoward@FOOverizonBAR.net> wrote in message news:<MPG.1ad3f71651d92c3c989742@news.verizon.net>...
> > In article <81f33a98.0403300324.67b93693@posting.google.com>,
> > gswork@mailcity.com says...
> > > Before that pascal was used a lot in teaching as it could help teach
> > > structured programming really well, and this was (at the time) a much
> > > needed relief in the professional world from hard to maintain
> > > spaghetti code.
> >
> > In the early 80s, it was typically the first 2-3 semesters, after which
> > came assembler and principles of computer architecture, low-level stuff,
> > device drivers, OS internals, language survey courses, data structures
> > and specialty courses. Most of which seems to being replaced by JAva,
> > HTML, PhP, Perl, ruby, database, web CMS, and a host of other "icing on
> > the cake" style classes that teach most students NOTHING about how or
> > why their programs work or how the underlying systems are implemented.
>
> Sounds like a move away from 'pure' to 'applied' mathematics or
> science to practical engineering, somewhat. When the area of study is
> new and access to applying it involves many fundamentals not easily
> understood by most it is necessary to teach those fundamentals.

Not so sure. Computer architecture, "low level stuff", device drivers
are also applied math and not pure math.

Indeed, I have long noticed a strange linguistic habit among computer
users and managers.

As soon as a "mere" programmer starts speaking with accuracy and
precision about what is happening in the software, the language
becomes coded as "academic", which is paradoxical, to say the least,
for it is the academic who cannot get down to brass tacks.

Whereas vague and noncommittal language, that takes fewer predictive
risks, is thought to be "simple and practical".

This is because we think as programmers that we confront artifacts
when we confront through the artifacts, social relations.

The new course which Mr. Howard enumerates seem to him to be fluff for
a reason and this is because part of their motivation is not only
imparting information it is also Manufacturing Consent to a paradigm
and a form of social engineering that dares not speak its name.

Precisely because the contradictions between self-interest in an
organization are NOT resolved, the organization's task becomes
reconciling people to its way of doing things and this necessarily
means that the computer class has to discourage "academic" critical
thought and questioning past a certain point.

There is nothing wrong with this because we get things done through
organizations.

Indeed, there is something strange about some "assembly language"
programmer, skilled circa 1955 at writing code for an early machine,
concluding that he is some sort of Noble Savage who confronts "nature"
and in John Locke's sense bends it to his will. For even the primitive
computer systems of the era represented a vast amount of the labor of
other people, concealed but real.

While basic computer "science" which answers such questions as "how
does a compiler work" needs to be performed, programmers should
probably think of themselves not as makers of artifacts at all but
instead see themselves as screenwriters, indeed a tribe which is
simultaneously necessary and at the bottom of the pecking order,
because the people in control resent their apparently inescapable
dependence on the mere programmer.

Doing so would also defuse the extraordinary bad temper of soured
individuals like Mr. Howard who readily uses the phrase "script
kiddie" to distinguish himself (who has it seemed developed, or
perhaps modified, at least one "device driver") from a feared tribe of
less than adequate people, of which his fear may be that he's a
member.

Basically, if you read, as I am reading currently, a book like
Softwar: an Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle, you shall
discover that the attempt to privilege any one style of programming as
intrinsically more Male or superior to any other (other than the
distinction between the correct and incorrect) is as dust and nothing
as far as the people, like Ellison, empowered and enriched by the work
of countless Oracle developers.

The technology is used by organizations, many of whom completely
disregard the long-term interests of middle-class software people,
whether "competent" or not, to rhetorically manufacture consent to
whatever it is they need to manufacture consent to.

The social unease that this creates becomes the necessary illusion
that "I have mastered something that is part of nature" when in fact
we're all enmeshed as writers within a Matrix that we cannot change
and probably should not change, not least because we can't survive
outside of it.
>
> As it moves on access becomes easier and tools more plentiful, in the
> wake of those more scientific pioneers. Many engineers, for instance,
> use trigonometry calculations with great success and make great
> contributions without needing to really understand the fundamental
> mathematical 'nature of the universe' reasons *why* they're needed.
>
> So it is with programmers as a profession, they can use Java and it's
> overwhelmingly luxurious library to do all kinds of things without
> needing to understand fundamentals.

Actually, my take is that both Java and CLR return us to those
thrilling days of yesteryear when in fact you did need to know the
relationship of source code to byte code. Furthermore, both paradigms
let you use threads and if you don't have some theoretical
apprehension of the counter-intuitive behavior of threads, you can
make a mess.

>
> Perhaps that's why Edward Nilges, among others, laments the lack of
> professional status among 'programmers' as a 'profession'.
>
> Regardless, it seems to be what's happening.

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