Matthias Buelow  <mkb@incubus.de> wrote:
+---------------
| People with a strong theoretical background (McCarthy, Ken Thompson,
| Donald Knuth) have created a lot better software than the
| buzzword-infested junk we often see today.
| 
| I think if you've broken in your brain on Turing machines or other
| minimal abstractions, so to say, you have a different approach at
| problem solving than just glueing together illmatched, badly thought out
| buzzwordy libraries, which is what most programming is about today.
+---------------

As much as I respect a strong theoretical background, the most
significant part of your statement might not be TMs per se, but
the bit about "or other minimal abstractions". I have generally
found that people who had backgrounds which included significant
assembly-language programming in restricted environments [whether
it was small memory, small instruction sets, and/or real-time
constraints (e.g., line-rate packet switching with PDP-8's!]
tended to also write much better code when using high-level
languages, large libraries, and the other accoutrements of
today's nearly-unlimited resources. That is, a certain tendency
towards mimimalism, together with experience in how to get real
work done in a mimimalist environment, is a useful trait even
(or even especially?!?) when the environment is not especially
limited.


-Rob

-----
Rob Warnock			<rpw3@rpw3.org>
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