[Gambas-user] Curious and interesting article.

[Benoît Minisini]

Le 05/12/2021 à 23:29, Antonio F.S. a écrit :
> El 5/12/21 a las 22:04, Benoît Minisini escribió:
>> Le 05/12/2021 à 11:31, Antonio F.S. a écrit :
>>> Good morning.
>>>
>>> I'm the guy from the "Gambas Foundation" that created so much 
>>> controversy on this mailing list. :-) :-) :-) By the way, I would 
>>> like to say to the person who insinuated that my proposal was that of 
>>> a novice, that probably when I was programming in big companies with 
>>> Fortran and Cobol, maybe he would be very young but he is not of my 
>>> generation (I was born in 1962).
>>>
>>> I share with you an article that I found interesting and that, even 
>>> though it is not directly related to GAMBAS, it does belong to our 
>>> computing area.
>>>
>>> Best regards.
>>> Antonio F.S.
>>>
>>>
>>> URL:
>>>
>>> https://fadingeek.medium.com/the-era-of-coding-is-ending-why-this-is-very-important-bdaa926bdc4 
>>>
>>
>> I read the article : It looks like pure salesman bullshit. I wonder if 
>> the article has been written by someone who actually used the "magic" 
>> tools he's talking about and if that guy actually wrote and maintain 
>> real softwares...
>>
>> -- 
>> Benoît Minisini
> ---------------------------------------------------------
> Hello.
> 
> Well, I remember in 1987 when at Burberrys Spain I was programming on an 
> HP 3000 on the MPE operating system with Fortran and hierarchical IMAGE 
> databases, creating code and more code in a brand new line editor (linux 
> nano is very modern compared to the one I was using then). The hammering 
> of impact printers and the mad spinning of tapes in those big machines 
> that looked like eyes and nothing else.  Our biggest hard disk was a 40 
> megabyte hard disk that weighed about three kilos and was two feet wide 
> and one foot deep. The connections on the terminals were made by Rs232 
> through huge multiplexers extending the communication signals with 
> cables, which resembled water pipes... At that time, thinking about the 
> Internet was like being told magic stories, at least in these IDEs and 
> programming languages...
> 
> Age has taught me to be cautious and humble...
> 
> Best regards.
> Antonio F.S.
> 

My comment may seem harsh, so I will try to explain myself better, even 
if English is a difficulty for me.

I understand what you answered. But do you see the difference with that 
article? Your are talking about your real and actual experience, whereas 
I found the article full of smoke not related to any real experience.

In other words: hardware has changed, but everybody still have to code. 
Maybe not on punch cards anymore, but did coding -really- and 
-fundamentally- changed?

Note that I have a similar experience of the hardware evolution than 
you, having learned computing programming on an Amstrad with just 48 Kb 
of free memory and a tape reader.

I play flute (orchestral flute) : the instrument was mainly a piece of 
wood with holes for a long time, until the mid of 19th century where it 
becomes a metal instrument with a complex key mechanism. But learning 
flute has not really changed, which is confirmed by the flute method 
written by Quantz in 1752. Most of what you read in it still apply. It 
was a bit of shock the first time I read it!

When you search and think a bit, blowing in a hollow tube with holes to 
make music is a human activity since the prehistoric time (we found 
flutes made by prehistoric people with bones about 30 000 years ago). We 
didn't change a lot since that time, and so playing a flute may still be 
the same art for thousand of years. It's just that we don't really use 
bones anymore. The instrument became more sophisticated with time, but 
the art didn't change fundamentally.

I think you have the same thing in "coding" activity. It's something 
that does not depend on computers, except that without a computer or 
something similar you can't actually code. It's a mental activity where 
you think about numeric objects produced by the hardware and the user, 
design how to represent them, which algorithm will structure them, 
decide how to present them to the human, and so on.

I think it's the same thing with architecture too. An architect can 
fully design a building in his head. Architecture techniques 
considerably changed with time, but I almost sure that the core of the 
architect art is the same for building a viaduct or the Aegyptians 
pyramids - except that if you ask a viaduct architect to build something 
like the Great Pyramid, he will tell you he will not know how to do. But 
you see what I mean.

I hope my explanations will make you excuse my initial harsh and proud 
comment. This kind of article about computing activity full of fuzziness 
tend to annoy me a lot!

Regards,

-- 
Benoît Minisini