3 ms·
> When you find swaths of knowledge that younger people don't know, you've found success in the overall human goal of abstracting concepts and building on the s
by wtbob 10y ago
> When you find swaths of knowledge that younger people don't know, you've found success in the overall human goal of abstracting concepts and building on the shoulders of those who came before us.
Abstracting, yes, but I don't know about building-upon. The thing is, a lot of this stuff is still sitting around beneath the covers, and someone needs to understand it.
Even worse, sometimes there's stuff that's abstracted over that's important, e.g. if the Excel or 1-2-3 teams had known about Field/Group/Record/Unit Separators, would they have ever come up with CSV?
Or the fact that SYN can be used to self-syncronise, due to its bit pattern …
- masklinn 10y ago> Even worse, sometimes there's stuff that's abstracted over that's important, e.g. if the Excel or 1-2-3 teams had known about Field/Group/Record/Unit Separators, would they have ever come up with CSV? Neither team had anything to do with CSV which originates in Fortran's list-directed I/O. And there is no field separator (which would be redundant with unit separator), FS is the file separator, these codes were intended for data and databases over sequential IO, in modern parlance a group is a table.