A program to measure flops in Perl (should it be this "off"?)

[axel]

That's because what the commercial world needs are not computer
scientists but system administrators, network administrators, file
server administrators, and so on. It makes about as much sense to
expect a computer scientist to be good at server or network
administration as it does for a mathematician to be good at
accounting. In the absence of respected accounting degrees, no doubt
many qualified accountants would have no choice but to get math
degrees, and that's the situation we're in with computer science:

Actually from my knowledge of accountancy firms, they had little
interest in universities which offered accounting degrees and
only visited a very few universities which did not offer
accounting as a degree. They preferred to recruit people
who had studied English Literature, a foreign language,
or History. So did the banks.

As far as I recall some firms did not bother to visit
universities other than Oxbridge, Edinburgh, St Andrews
and I think maybe Exeter.

 

[John Bokma]

MIX isn't a pseudo language,

It was. AFAIK the emulators came much later.

implementations. That it wasn't written for any specific hardware
makes no difference. Nothing is glossed over in a MIX program, all
the details are there.

A pseudo language doesn't mean that you gloss over things.

 

[John Bokma]

Again: when I respond to a point with an entire sentence, responding
to the first phrase of the sentence as if it was the whole point is
NOT HELPFUL, especially when the rest of the sentence undercuts your
point.

So you are just a troll with a very odd quoting style?

 

[John Bokma]

At a minimum, I'd say C (for being close to the machine), FORTRAN or
COBOL (for business reasons), LISP or Scheme (no code/data dichotomy),
Haskell or ML (modern functional programming), Smalltalk or Eiffel
(for pure, powerful object-orientation), assembly of some sort (for
being even closer to the machine than C), and Java, C#, or C++
(because that's what industry uses).

So basically, the education you got is the best? LOL. When I did my study I
remember people saying that all those high level languages like C... people
got out of touch with hardware. No, my son, pushing switches, and setting
bits with a soldering iron, that's the shit.

 

[John Bokma]

It is true. I remember a project I had to write in C++ which I
could probably have done in a fifth of the time in Perl (which
was not an option). Still, who was I to complain too much
as I got paid for it.

My best guess is that Charlton got stuck in a different age.

programmer time is in a lot of fields *expensive*. The only time I did
assembly language optimization, manually, was when there was no faster
hardware for my customer, nor was is possible to do it in parallel, since
another computer was cheaper then the hand coding.

It's has nothing to do with Perl culture. Back then I was a C programmer
(and BASIC ). I have been using quite a number of programming languages,
but optimization with assembly, profiling, analyzing the generated code, is
only worth in some cases (like embedded hardware etc.).

And optimizing in a high level language can change, the compiler can get
better, or do different things.

Perl has several examples, e.g. map in a void context.

 

[John W. Kennedy]

We tried microcoding, a decade or two back (on IBM 4331/4361
mainframes, which were microcoded machines "under the covers", even
though they looked like 370/XA architecture on the surface).

Virtually all 360-type machines have been microcoded from the very
beginning. The only ones I know not to have been are the 360/44 (with a
drastically reduced instruction set) and the 360/75, though I suspect
the 360/91, 360/95, and perhaps the 360/195 and 370/195 were not, as well.

 

[Alan J. Flavell]

Virtually all 360-type machines have been microcoded from the very
beginning.

OK, but I meant in the sense that the customer got some kind of access
to that level, and could (if so inclined) create custom microcodes for
their application.

all the best.

 

[John W. Kennedy]

OK, but I meant in the sense that the customer got some kind of access
to that level, and could (if so inclined) create custom microcodes for
their application.

Again, it was possible -- just not talked about much. Allan-Babcock's
RUSH time-sharing system, for example, was based on 360/50's that had a
microcoded PL/I interpreter, and I know of an Euler (ALGOL derivative)
compiler microcoded for 360/30's. (The 360/30 and /50 were especially
good at that sort of thing, because their microcode was physically
implemented as punched cards that served as the dielectrics of 960
capacitors each.)

 

[Charlton Wilbur]

JB> So you are just a troll with a very odd quoting style?

Um, no. I speak in complete sentences, not sound bites; if you
respond to the first phrase of the sentence as if it were a sound
bite, ignoring what the rest of the sentence says, it's unlikely to
lead to productive conversation.

Indeed, in this case, it has not; and I fully expect *someone* to
quote that sentence only as far as "I speak in complete sentences, not
sound bites."

Charlton

 

[Charlton Wilbur]

(quoting me, partially and thus inaccurately)

(the rest of the quotation)

irrelevant, and it sure as hell doesn't mean that a programmer
shouldn't be aware of the various tradeoff possibilities among
implementation difficulty, resource consumption, and speed.

JB> My best guess is that Charlton got stuck in a different age.

Hardly. Charlton did not say anything like what you seem to be
responding to.

JB> It's has nothing to do with Perl culture. Back then I was a C
JB> programmer (and BASIC ). I have been using quite a number
JB> of programming languages, but optimization with assembly,
JB> profiling, analyzing the generated code, is only worth in some
JB> cases (like embedded hardware etc.).

Yes; and any programmer worth the title should be aware of the various
tradeoff possibilities among implementation difficulty, resource
consumption, and speed. Even if in the general case programmer time
is expensive and computer time is cheap.

Charlton

 

[Charlton Wilbur]

JB> So basically, the education you got is the best? LOL.

No. My formal education omitted FORTRAN, COBOL, Smalltalk, and
Scheme, for various reasons, mainly involving tradeoffs between
pedagogical and practical usefulness and classroom time; and Java and
C#, as they had not yet been invented.

My observation as a working programmer has been that there's a certain
ability of creativity, resourcefulness, and flexibility that is
correlated with knowing and understanding several languages. I'm not
sure if the good qualities are the result of the knowledge and
understanding or the other way around, but I'm willing to recommend an
education based on the premise that knowing and understanding many
languages will produce a better programmer. If the causation works
the other way, there's nothing that can be done anyway.

And the absolute worst programmers, bar none, that I have ever worked
with were the ones who knew Java and only Java or Perl and only Perl.
Again, I'm not sure which is the cause and which is the effect, but in
my experience there's a strong correlation between inability as a
programmer and monolingualism, especially monolingualism in a "hot"
language.

Charlton