On a sunny day (Sun, 8 Mar 2020 12:52:59 -0000 (UTC)) it happened Martin
Gregorie  wrote in :

>On Sun, 08 Mar 2020 07:30:55 +0000, Jan Panteltje wrote:
>
>> You can, if you are into that, read 'Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie.
>> The C Programming Language'
>
>I learnt C from reading K&R - easy-peasy, but then I was already a
>programmer and analyst.
>
>My first language was Algol 60, followed by PLAN (ICL 1900 mainframe
>assembler) when I started work, then COBOL, Algol 68 (a much underrated
>language), BASIC, PL/9 and then C.
>
>If you're a new programmer and have just learned C or Java, I can
>thoroughly recommend getting hold of "The Practice of Programming" by
>Kernighan and Pike.
>
>Its aim is to teach new programmers how to write well-structured,
>readable programs that are easy to debug and/or extend. These are skills
>that very few language-specific books or programming courses teach but
>are essential for a professional programmer or anybody planning to write
>and publish free software.
>
>Though its written round the Algol, Pascal, C, Java family of languages,
>the ideas in it are applicable to almost any programming language.

Indeed!

As I come from a hardware background, I was solving problems using logic
circuits
long before there were computers available.
I think this is a plus, being familiar with hardware and logic.
That HS100 slow motion huge disk machine was not controlled by some micro
processor
but by simple logic gates.. resulting in boards full of not so simple logic
circuits..
Same for the AVR1 video recorders, quite nice and very fast.
'Turing' is not always the best solution to problems.
And we used analog computing circuits..

I remember that night I was first trying BASIC on a computer and was touched by
that if I did poke ADDRESS 123 and then read it back with PEEK ADDRESS the
result was also 123,
not only that POKE and PEEK ADDRESS+1 did not affect what was on ADDRESS.
For me it was a step from analog computing to wanting to do more with digital.
Like from a slide-rule to a real calculator
On the slide-rule 2 * 2 was always about 4 plus or minus something..
Finally could get into exact answers!
These day I think, with all the hype about 'quantum computers'
those guys completely miss the point, noise takes them back -- in fact they
_have_ an old analog computer.
Many a scientific paper is published that has as last line
"his will (with more funding duh) bring the quantum computer much closer"
My suggestion to those guys is: come with something that can factor a large
number.

You see those noise limits also in for example multilevel FLASH memory,
the charge (or say voltage) in a singe cell is then divided in say 4 levels for
4 bits, noise looks you in the face as to how far you can go with the number of
levels.
Add a bit radiation and it is all over, do not take it on a mars trip..
Elon reading this???

Anyways, programming is fun, but for heavens sake please know the hardware too.

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