Engineering
Engineering
Posted Feb 24, 2017 4:55 UTC (Fri) by gerdesj (subscriber, #5446)Parent article: Toward a more approachable Rust
I ended up in IT (long story, short) due to the last recession in the UK. Not the 2008 shenanigans but the one in 1991ish. I should have been a Civil Engineer but I graduated at the same time as the UK building industry decided to take a bit of a time out. Before that unfortunate event, I spent bloody ages learning stuff.
I discovered the joys of how to chase stresses and strains around a structure. I also learned a few other things, not least of which was how many bloody super and subscripts a differential equation can have with regards bits of concrete and steel. Wood is a bit different but still quantitative(ish).
I don't think that you can spend four days with a new concept or system or whatever and decide that it is rubbish. I think that what Raymond demonstrated here was a malaise particular to to IT (this is in no way directed at Raymond personally).
Why on earth is there not a clear and unambiguous way of programming a computer without resorting to machine code? Why can't you clever buggers give us laymen a language we can use? You've had over 40 years to play with.
I'll learn C in the interim - it seems to be designed by Engineers (sharp edges - wear gloves).
Cheers
Jon
Posted Feb 24, 2017 5:50 UTC (Fri)
by neilbrown (subscriber, #359)
[Link]
The elephant in the room here is that you are not a rational being, any more than I am. You can fake it a lot of the time, but underneath you are instincts and intuition and hunches and past experience and approximations. All of this works amazing well when working with wide error margins. But in the digital world, if you want error margins, you need to explicitly design them in.
Well.. to be fair, a little bit of you probably is rational, but not enough to be as productive as you want without help from the other bits.
The only thing that isn't "clear and unambiguous" here is the human psyche.
Posted Feb 25, 2017 18:10 UTC (Sat)
by shmget (guest, #58347)
[Link] (1 responses)
Furthermore, in IT, contrary to civil engineering, we usually do not afford the luxury of having a 3x to 10x 'safety' factor to hide the bugs.
Posted Mar 1, 2017 14:50 UTC (Wed)
by anton (subscriber, #25547)
[Link]
Engineering
Engineering
there is, but human are all but 'clear and ambiguous'.
There are lots of applications that can and do afford resource usages (CPU, memory consumption) beyond the necessary minimum by these or much larger factors. A problem we have in computing is that that does not necessarily help safety.
Engineering