Re: Patents Unleashed and the future of Java Programming

From: George Neuner (gneuner2_at_dont.spam.me)
Date: 05/22/04 

Date: Sat, 22 May 2004 04:07:34 -0400

On Fri, 21 May 2004 07:54:13 GMT, Andrew Thompson
<SeeMySites@www.invalid> wrote:

>On Fri, 21 May 2004 03:39:32 -0400, George Neuner wrote:
>
>> CS is still more of an art than a
>> science and much knowledge has been passed by tradition
>
>..like what?
>

Have you ever seen documented an algorithm for determining the number
of '1' bits in a word? The highest '1' bit in a word? The lowest?

When you learned to program you a) didn't care, b) figured them out
for yourself or c) somebody showed you how and you never looked back.
In 25 years, I've never seen these algorithms covered in ANY book or
paper targeted for ANY level of programmer. Yet we all know how to do
these elementary things.

FYI, software solutions to the above are patented by NEC.

>>and never published.
>
>What exactly do you mean by 'published'?

I mean "published" as in disseminated in some (reasonably) public
forum. For this purpose I will accept internal company efforts meant
to educate employees but not necessarily distributed beyond the
company. However, I disqualify "reading coworkers code", "looking at
your coworkers notes", etc. and any other sources not meant to be
disseminated in a general way.

There is an enormous amount of "gestault" knowledge about what works
and what doesn't which we all figured out for ourselves by trial and
error, was demonstrated to us by some mentor or was grokked by reading
someone else's code. We in turn have showed others what works and
what doesn't. No doubt we learned by reading the published works of
others, but our work is unique - an amalgam of our own experience
which is seldom written down.

Pick any non trivial problem and take a moment to think about how you
would go about solving it. Ok, now you've though about it. So tell
me - where did you see that solution published?

Even the most anal retentive documentation efforts (I've worked on
medical diagnostic instruments) fall far short of documenting the
software algorithm used to determine whether an integer value is odd.

George
=============================================
Send real email to GNEUNER2 at COMCAST o NET

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