A Generation Lost in the Bazaar - Poul-Henning Kamp article

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 05:05:57PM -0400, phiscock-g851W1bGYuGnS0EtXVNi6w at public.gmane.org wrote:
> An interesting read. However, it reminded me somewhat of those
> conversations I used to have in the faculty lounge, where another prof
> would lament about the abilities of the current crop of students, and how
> the world was going to hell in a handbasket.
> 
> At that point, I'd sing the lines from the play 'By By Birdie':
> 
> Why can't they be like we were,
> Perfect in every way.
> What's the matter with kids today?
> 
> I also well remember the dot Com (although alas did not have the wit to
> exploit it financially), and a young kid telling me how he was going to
> put together an 'image over internet' company that would blow us old
> fogies out of the water. This without any working understanding of the
> concept of bandwidth. He's now repairing machinery in Ottawa.
> 
> It takes time to learn the craft of software development. It also helps,
> early in the process, to have one of those out-of-control experiences,
> like training on a go-cart and then finding oneself at the wheel of a dual
> semi-trailer on a mountain road. You can't believe, doing some toy
> software exercises, that software is difficult at all, or requires much of
> a structure, or that You Need a Plan. I used to put my students through
> that with an exercise in machine language. (Navigating a robot through a
> maze.)  ML is excellent for this experience, because it has absolutely no
> inherent structure, and you have to create it. You get into spaghetti
> monster of a program in only a few pages of code. Once they had that
> experience, and not before, they were ready to listen to ideas of
> modularization, magic numbers, controlled access to the hardware, and so
> on.

We usally call that assembly code since ML is a very nice language
from the 60s with excellent type checking and polymorphism and other
nice things.  If you were actually writing the hex codes, well that's
just mean (not that I haven't done that back in highschool).

> Overall, I am just astonished by the quality and quantity of software that
> has been generated in the Bazaar. By 'quality', I refer to the reliability
> of the code, and the excellence of its user interfaces - not the beauty of
> the code inside. That's fine - most of us are drivers, not mechanical
> engineers. When was the last time you or your lay friends popped the hood
> on a car and marvelled at the layout of the engine compartment?
> 
> Based on what I'm seeing, there is some really fine work being done. So
> yeah, let's slang the bad stuff. (Why is it that the ls command doesn't
> have an option of showing only directories? Sheesh. Oh, well, I'll just
> use the GUI version, which does it nicely.) Eventually the lousy stuff
> will get depreciated or dumped. Put me with the optimists.

Why should ls care about filetypes?  It just lists what it is asked to
list and that list actually comes from the shell (remember unlike DOS,
the shell does the expansion which means all programs support wildcards,
not the way in DOS only some programs supported wildcards and only in
the way they chose to implement).

On many shells you can do ls -d */ to just get directories.

Of course find works well for it too.

DOS' dir command had to have such options since command.com did nothing
other than run programs with arguments.  Figuring out what files were
there and filtering them was up to each program.  After all DOS couldn't
do 'echo *' as a cheap replacement for dir.

-- 
Len Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists