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von Neumann was angry at a student for writing a program that would produce binary code rather than assembling it by hand https://twitter.com/sigfpe/status/142
by valyagolev 5y ago
von Neumann was angry at a student for writing a program that would produce binary code rather than assembling it by hand
https://twitter.com/sigfpe/status/1420961392585154569 https://twitter.com/sigfpe/status/1420961392585154569
- TeMPOraL 5y agoOh, the brief time in computing history when computer time was more expensive than human time.
- valyagolev 5y agohighlights the point that not valuing either will waste both
- microtherion 5y agoIf you take into account that the particular humans whose time was (not) valued here were graduate students, that time may not have been so brief after all.
- lou1306 5y agoI mean, it sounds weird now, but back then the assembler would indeed have eaten up precious CPU time. Imagine if, nowadays, a grad student took a node in a scientific cluster to run Dreamweaver in a Windows VM instead of writing HTML by hand. (Sorry, it's the closest analogy I could come up with)
- zetalyrae 5y agovon Neumann was probably the most intelligent person ever documented. He was probably frustrated that people couldn't see the machine code fully formed in their mind's eye :)
- runlaszlorun 5y agoAgreed! I also think that von Neumann (and some of his contemporaries as well) were likely the last to be able to understand the entire breadth of math, physics, and computer science at the time. These days we’re all far too specialized…
- scott_s 5y agoWOW. J.A.N. Lee taught my intro to programming in C++ course back in '99. He retired during my undergrad.