Comments on: The View from Mt. Deja Vu

By: MiaM

MiaM — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 20:40:40 +0000

At least it’s a good thing that people don’t need to know octal any more…

(Octal is IMHO a relic from the days when computers had word length evenly divisable by 3 and hexadecimal hadn’t been invented)…

By: Gerasimos Dimitriadis

Gerasimos Dimitriadis — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 08:00:13 +0000

I really liked the Knthulhu reference…. pure Kthulhu evil, but with a bit of Knuth sophistication in it. Genius!

By: sysprv

sysprv — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 19:37:55 +0000

OK, I’m going to hang this at my workstation.

By: Scott Duncan

Scott Duncan — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 15:28:54 +0000

So what is “Octal”?

Okay, sorry. Brings back memories of working with Easycoder on a — room-filling — Honeywell Mod I with a whopping 24K.

And, to those who will “come up with the next iteration of programming that drives all the old people insane,” I am reminded of when I realized I, too, could create something (clever and useful) that other people found hard to figure out and, then, realized, after doing this a few times, that it really would be better to create clever and useful things that others could understand.

By: philip andrew

philip andrew — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 13:35:03 +0000

Yes, keep away from the evil c++ overloaded operators and all the other things you don’t need to do to get the job done, but seemed cool when first starting out.

By: Dan

Dan — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 05:07:05 +0000

Man, I’m part of that generation and even I understand Ain’t broke/Don’t fix. There are only certian situations where someone could come to me with a fix that sounds evil and I would even consider it (Like, On a mobile platform.) simply out of my do it right or don’t do it policy. We’re all not insane, but keep in mind, we are the ones who are going to come up with the next iteration of programming that drives all the old people insane (I’m hoping I’m old by then… I don’t want to be responsible for what comes next. I’m already part of making Java Popular. I know. I’m sorry)

By: Jeff Curless

Jeff Curless — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 04:05:39 +0000

So true! I remember doing a lot of that when I was younger, now I don’t have the time or the inclination….

And yes, I do tell people to get off my coding-lawn nowadays ;-)

By: ashleigh

ashleigh — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 02:50:54 +0000

Oh yes, too true.

I get that same look when I launch into a tale about why something is, or is not, or is a bad idea…

People do however learn by their own mistakes, and don’t really like being told, they’d rather find out the hard way. I guess that also allows them, in 20 years, to be the grumpy old fart telling tales to young ‘uns.