Computer people - Where did you learn most you're stuff?

gtm,
quite often it is very useful to know what is going on underneath the bonnet. certainly when it comes to debugging strange stack problems, memory leaks or megalomanic compiler f*ck ups it is.
cheers


julian

 

So you can make a sensible choice between an 'ArrayList' and a 'LinkedList'?

Or does this make any sense to the deliberately ignorant? FWIW the page that is linked from has some very interesting stuff on it.

Paul

 

OK, of course some more low level stuff is always going to be tricky in a language like Java or C# that is not fully compiled but the vast majority of "business" (for want of a better word) applications can be written in Java just as well as any other language and IMO they will be the more robust for it (and probably be written more quickly).

You can use static RT libraries of course to get around the problem but then you end up with 1Mb+ sized .exe files.

It's got nothing to do with being a Sun customer. If we were running our production systems on Dell servers running Linux we'd have the same advantage.

Perhaps not in the retail arena, but two of the most important and most powerful desktop (client) applications in our company are written in Java. Everyone thinks they're written in C++ when they first see them

Interesting article about double checked locking btw, thanks.

Michael.

 

huh? i'm a programmer / systems analyst / "trainee" project manager and most of that made no sense whatsoever.
guess that must be the benefit of a 4gl language like Natural.

I do PHP/Mysql for my own personal web development side-line and that's pretty simple, controlling HTML and doing db lookups.

garbage collection ? that happens on wednesday mornings.

 

I thought 4gl languages were only found in museums nowadays...

Paul

 

Museums and banking. You'd be surprised what you'll find still in use in major institutions, something to do with the complexity and expense of a redevelopment I suspect.

-- Ian

 

Accepted, but surely they are the results of bad programming in the first place? Surely the higher the level of the language the less likely these sort of things are? As essentially given a high enough language, all you are doing is linking together blocks of pre written code to achieve the final result.

If the high level language is bug ridden that would be a different argument surely.

GTM

 

Paul,

It doesn't make any sense to me at all to be perfectly honest. But without knowing the difference between an "arraylist" or "linkedlist" presumably the choice would be down to how you would like your data linked/read/written? Couldn't this as easily be done by some higher level function?

For example why couldn't a programming utillity be used to programme? As opposed to writing it raw? This utility could check for errors in any code you wrote, and also make use of "pop up" questions to help you make choices. After all every bit of code should be able to be represented in a flow diagram. What are these if they are not a set of questions and input/output points. Why can't the software be compiled from a suitable list of such questions built at a higher level. All the programmer has to do is design a suitable flow diagram and the programming utility does the rest. Much like many WYSIWYG website design applications do.

GTM

 

You have to know the characteristics in order to choose a suitable collection for your application, they might be functionally equivalent yet even a modern computer can be brought to its knees by an inappropriate choice.

Paul

 

gtm,
by definition any bug is the result of bad programming however as humans we are not perfect and therefore mistakes will be made no matter how high level the language used. nature has given us this wonderful method of dealing with this reality - learning from our mistakes. however if you decide to learn before you make the mistake then it makes you less likely to make them in the first place or if one is made it can usually be found quicker.
maybe for the usual business aplications you could get by with sticking your head in the sand but if you need to do anything slightly out of the ordinary - never mind the kind of stuff i have to deal with then any knowledge is useful. for example i use middleware (which interfaces with various coprocessors and rendering accelerators) a lot and occasionally i get a crash at a place where the debugger cannot use source level debugging. at this point you'd have to give up or rely on customer service but because i know what is going on under the hood i can make some educated guesses and (hopefully) find the bug. it's not a guarantee but it improves my chances and means the project isn't woefully late. just very late
cheers

julian