Java > Scala

[Russel Winder]

On Mon, 2011-12-19 at 14:39 -0800, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 12/19/2011 1:35 PM, bearophile wrote:
> > Given the amount of time it takes to punch the cards, waiting for your turn
> > to run the program, and reading the printouts, I think punchcards also teach
> > you to use your brain first and to think before doing/trying things, instead
> > of going by trial and error. Trial and error is an efficient strategy only if
> > you have interactive tools that speedup the cycle and the problems to solve
> > are not too much hard.
> 
> I've never seen any evidence that punchcards made one a better programmer. For 
> sure, one wrote far fewer programs, and infinitely shorter ones, with 
> punchcards, and so simply lack of experience would make one worse.
> 
> As a programmer who initially learned with punchcards, using an interactive tty 
> is far, far, FAR more productive.

Definitely.

There were techniques and skills for working at the time, but these have
long since passed away into unecessariness.

The past has a lot to teach (cf. actors, dataflow, CSP, etc.) but we
need to be selective so as to avoid too much "rose coloured spectacles"
effect.

> And using a full screen editor is another HUGE jump in productivity. Ditto for 
> going to big screens and multiple windows.

cards < teletype < monitor terminal < windowing system

> There are many things I miss about the olden days of programming, but 
> punchcards, paper tape, and ASR-33 teletypes are not among them. While I'm at 
> it, cassette tapes, floppies and modems I always hated and am glad to be done with.

Indeed.

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at russel.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
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