Mike yearwood wrote: > Learning the alphabet is often considered a building block, but is not > a fundamental block necessary for speaking. Pronounciation is also a > fundamental building block, yet a small child is often physically > incapable of pronouncing many sounds. > > My point was that a fundamental aspect of programming - modularization > - is lost by giving someone a "grounding" in the language. They learn > that a program is a single monolithic procedure instead of a set of > discrete building blocks. > > >
Someone who has a Computer Science degree may not be any better of a programmer than one who has had less formal education, to be sure, but, if they paid attention, the CS degree person should understand the fundamentals of WHY things happen as they do and perhaps write better code as a result of that understanding. In this day/age where space is cheap/plentiful and bandwidth is becoming more available, you don't have to squeeze performance anymore as much due to these advances in hardware. The anal retentive side of me still prefers to do a CLI instead of a CLC when only comparing one byte....figuratively speaking. (Those who know Assembler will get that one.) Do I want to micromanage details like garbage collection? No....that's why I prefer VFP instead of C++. I guess my point to this rambling is this: while we want to not have to worry about the mundane details of the fundamentals of programming, it's still good to understand the concepts and hopefully it leads to better programming. I'm reminded of a front page FoxTalk article from years ago where the author (I think Doug Hennig) had talked about this routine that ran thousands and thousands of lines of code in a small amount of time. He noted that it was awesome that Fox could do that, but also noted that the original coder had coded it sloppily---it didn't HAVE to do all that but instead could have been done much better. Yet the speed of the Fox masked his "inefficiency." -- Michael J. Babcock, MCP MB Software Solutions, LLC http://mbsoftwaresolutions.com http://fabmate.com "Work smarter, not harder, with MBSS custom software solutions!" _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[EMAIL PROTECTED] ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
