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  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday January 15 2018, @07:50PM (1 child)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Monday January 15 2018, @07:50PM (#622690) Journal

    Software. Started with interpreted BASIC in the 70's. (that's NINTEEN seventies.) Instant gratification to run a program but without the happy ending.

    Learning Pascal in about 1981 was elegant, and was mind opening. Functions with locally scoped variables. Recursion. Data structures processed by recursion. Modules (aka "units"). Brief dabbling in 8086 assembly to write fast display code for IBM PC hardware screen buffer to enable pop up windows, saving, restoring window contents, arbitrary scrolling of a confined rectangular area of the screen, etc. Dabbling in M68000 assembly to write Mac desk accessories, system service programs loaded at boot time (the icon parade), and link the 68000 code with the main body of code in Pascal.

    Learning Lisp in about 1986 was way more mind opening. The whole idea of "symbollic" processing. Pattern matching. Unification. Logic programming. The power of Macros. Lazy lists (a subset of lazy evaluation). A taste of functional programming with higher order functions. Building parsers. Seeing a much easier (but slower execution) way that workable compilers could be implemented. Of course studying different implementations of garbage collection. Searching a problem space for a solution. Minimax for two person zero sum game play. Planning the movements of a hypothetical robot arm to achieve a goal.

    If you can live in an R&D playground in the 80's and 90's, I highly recommend it.

    As for study? Yea, in School, definitely software. But the thing is: never stop studying and learning. Always be learning. There came a point where I could no longer know everything that was going on. So I specialized my interests and have a shallow level of knowledge on some subjects.

    Tip: learn not only the level of abstraction that your peers work in, but what goes on below that abstraction. And even the level of abstraction below that. Soon you become the answer guy that everyone comes to. People line up at your office door. Managers eventually take note of that.

    --
    People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
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  • (Score: 1) by anubi on Tuesday January 16 2018, @10:37AM

    by anubi (2828) on Tuesday January 16 2018, @10:37AM (#623069) Journal

    Those were the days. I experienced them as well.

    These days, I feel I am playing with legos... any of which may be taken away and replaced with something similar at a whim of management ... and they expect me to make something that works out of it.

    --
    "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]