3 ms·
When I was a preschooler, Lego was a precision European version building brick which was a whole level up from alternatives but it was still just red and white
by fuzzfactor 4y ago
When I was a preschooler, Lego was a precision European version building brick which was a whole level up from alternatives but it was still just red and white bricks for kids to build their own little brick homes and buildings like that.
With point-to-point electronics at the time, the relatively large components were soldered into interesting 3-dimensional patterns protected by a metal chassis which normally had plain terminal strips and the underside of vacuum tube sockets to use as connection points.
With the proliferation of circuit boards, the components were lined up a lot more like Lego on a substrate but still more colorful.
Imagine every circuit board more colorful than a pile of random small Lego bricks today.
And it was even more obvious there had to be a pattern there that would be worth recognizing.
I liked building with Lego, but I liked building with this stuff a lot more.
- WalterBright 4y agoI wirewrapped electronics boards to pay my way through college. I would also lay out the chips on the board. I discovered that if I laid out the chips in certain patterns, the wires would also form certain patterns. That way, I could easily tell if the wiring was off (the posts are .1" apart, and it is easy to get off by one). With these patterns, I rarely had the board go to smoke testing with a wirewrap error in it. This made me popular with people who needed a board done. I did this also with boards to be soldered. All the resistors were lined up the same way, the diodes all pointed the same way, the chips had the #1 pin in the same place, etc. It all made for patterns that made checking easy. I once was talking to a tech at a high end audio store. He said you could tell the high end boards because the resistors all pointed the same way. Same thing. A constructor contractor told me a proxy for quality work is the screw slots were all at the same angle. I use the same technique with software. I try to lay out the code so it forms a visual pattern, this makes it easy to check for errors. It's also why I don't use source code formatters, as they disrupt the patterns.
- galaxyLogic 4y agoIn source-code formatting vertical alignment is well-known pattern. Is there something else you're thinking of?
- KMag 4y agoIn my experience, when an auto-formatter re-wraps a line that gets a char or two too wide for your coding standard, it generally does an aesthetically poor job of it.
- makapuf 4y agoI just like when gofmt aligns items before and after the equal sign, and comments in a struct. It may sound frivolous, but it sparks joy and that's not to overlook !
- contingencies 4y agoInteresting comment. Note the resistor-same-way thing is mostly no longer applicable (due to the plethora of SMD components and their placement by machine). It remains useful for through-hole components such as large capacitors, however.
- WalterBright 4y agoAn example: https://github.com/dlang/dmd/blob/master/compiler/src/dmd/cparse.d#L2217 https://github.com/dlang/dmd/blob/master/compiler/src/dmd/cp...
- fuzzfactor 4y agoThat is beautifully done. I don't have to know the language to see that your code is built in a very orderly fashion and the components are intended to interact in a carefully-defined way. Not unlike a well-engineered circuit board.