[rescue] Re: G5 case

[Eric Dittman]

> > I find starting any of the OO applications to be
> > slow, but once they are started they seem okay to
> > me.
> 
>    I'm of the opinion that OO *anything* is going to be slower than the 
> same application written in a procedural language.  Like it or not, 
> computers aren't object-oriented devices...they're entirely procedural. 
>   I believe that pretending they're not by using object-oriented 
> programming languages will nearly always result in inefficient use of 
> the hardware.

The OO I was referring to was OpenOffice, not Object Oriented.

>    The troubling part is, the kids being turned out of colleges as 
> "computer programmers" these days don't have any understanding of how 
> computers actually *work*...they've only been taught how to write code 
> in object-oriented languages, thinking that understanding the low-level 
> operations of computers is somehow "obsolete" or no longer necessary.  
> I've found that, in general, their idea of the "power" or usefulness of 
> a language is defined by how easy that language is to write code in.  I 
> shit-can resumes from kids like this every day.

This is nothing new.  When I was in college the CS
program was turning out programmers that could put
bits they learned together, but nothing original
with good quality.  They (kinda) knew what they
were doing, but not _WHY_ they were doing it.

All the really good programming and administration
jobs that were open to students were usually filled
with EE students.

When I was in my last semester I took a CS class.
One of the projects was to network two systems
using parallel ports.  We were to support two
different speeds, one program for each speed.
The CS students started churning out code.  I
look a look at the hardware, then wrote one program
that supported the two required speeds (plus several
others) and autonegotiated the connection speed.

The CS students were extremely smug about an EE
major taking one of their senior-level CS courses
at the beginning.  By the end of the class, the
instructor was deferring to me on some of the
topics.  I still remember when he said something
couldn't be done, to which I objected.  He said
if I thought it could be done to prove it by
writing a program.  I showed him how to do it
with two lines of machine code.
-- 
Eric Dittman
dittman at dittman.net