| Re: Jinx [message #94335 is a reply to message #94325] |
Tue, 31 August 2021 18:02  |
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Wayne Parham
Messages: 18791
Registered: January 2001
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Illuminati (33rd Degree) |
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I hear you, Bruce. My career has spanned those eras - Starting at a time when microcomputers were still just "on the horizon" and all business was done on mainframes and minicomputers from IBM, DEC and Data General. Now days, everything is really different. What was the best coding style back then is no longer seen as being appropriate in most cases. But then again, in certain situations - like memory-constrained microcontrollers - what was good practice back then still is today.
So some of the ways programmers are taught to work now-days doesn't apply very well to a machine with little memory. These newer technologies are optimized for abstraction, so that complex programs can be written in a way that's more readable and maintainable. But that sacrifices efficiency in the form of larger compiled code and sometimes it's a little slower too. Then again, back in the 1970s, systems were rated in thousands of instructions per second and one million instructions per second was a "holy grail." Now days, an Intel i7 will run nearly 100 billion instructions per second.
It's interesting to work with both technologies - the stuff from the 1970s and the stuff from today - because of that juxtaposition. I enjoy coding in assembler or using C, styled from the 1970s. I enjoy the old BASIC programs with line numbers. But I also enjoy modern C/C++ and Java tech stacks, with technologies like Spring and its dependency injection approaches. They're as different as onions and orangutans.
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