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Would academia still reward that kind of thinking? Business certainly doesn't seem to, where you're mostly sticking to 'universal' solutions. The problem is tha
by mhd 4y ago
Would academia still reward that kind of thinking? Business certainly doesn't seem to, where you're mostly sticking to 'universal' solutions. The problem is that this 'universe' has such an enormous range.
- bhaak 4y agoI was at Wirth's farewell lecture and the topic of the Laudatio was a friendly roast on how Wirth failed to bring in lots of money by creating very efficient solutions which weren't commercial successes. I think it certainly wasn't the norm back in the day. It's often easier to pile on existing solutions and try to go further by trying to cover up problems. Look how far we've come with the tooling surrounding C (e.g. static analyzer or runtimer fuzzers). But sometimes you need to take a few steps back. It might not be obvious when looking at it today, but when Java came onto the scene, it had a tremendous effect on software engineering. It was a breath of fresh air that you could concentrate on other topics than how to prevent buffer overflows or what would be the best String class. Java pushed modern programming practices in a way C or C++ just couldn't. I often joke that I am very grateful to Java as it saved me from working in C++. But if you ask most programmers today, you don't get a very good opinion of Java. You probably shouldn't try to disrupt programming if you want to have rewards. :)