_yosefk

77 ms·

661.
by _yosefk 14y ago
I agree with everything except for "just as easily". It's trivial to extract memory parallelism from separate instruction streams and heroic to impossible for a single stream. Think processing 1000 linked lists sequentially vs processing 4
662.
by _yosefk 14y ago
Of course this fight is not over, and I agree with your points to some degree or other (especially "they might not wait as often" - memory access being the bottleneck is in my experience less likely for a moderately sized multi-CPU system;
663.
by _yosefk 14y ago
I've read this comparison between Go and ALGOL-68, and I did enjoy it. Here are quotes from it that explain the difference between "good" and "effective" - exactly the point that I was making here (the article we're discussing claiming that
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by _yosefk 14y ago
Seriously? Actual production code in ALGOL in 2013? If I ever had to deal with that code, I think I'd feel about like you would have if I wrote this comment in Aramaic because I prefer it to English on numerous grounds. I'd very much prefer
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by _yosefk 14y ago
The article argued that C was effective in practice, not that it was better than X in some other sense. Would you prefer to write production code in FORTRAN, ALGOL 60 and 68, Turbo Pascal, or Smalltalk to writing it in C today?
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by _yosefk 14y ago
Actually I didn't claim that lock-free is more efficient - I explicitly said that it isn't necessarily more efficient, though I didn't discuss the reasons that you do discuss; I only said that "lock-based" is defined by the need to deal w
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by _yosefk 14y ago
BitKeeper user here; AFAIK BitMover got $0 for hosting Linux though they did get a lot of fame. And their biggest problem apparently isn't that BitKeeper "turned into a LinuxKeeper", but rather free BitKeeper clones like git and hg (the fir
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by _yosefk 14y ago
Do you seriously claim that janitors in the 25th percentile make about the same as programmers in said percentile, on average - that the average is the same for all occupations? I rather doubt it. I mean, it makes sense that return on all s
669.
by _yosefk 14y ago
I think ageism is "the" problem that you point out, because this is why people can't even get an interview after age 40, right? There are employers biased against older candidates, I guess - though not near me, not to the point where I'm ab
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by _yosefk 14y ago
That's rather nice indeed; I think the mean earnings for lawyers aren't that high and there's quite a lot of variance, not? (Unfortunately, this is a theoretical discussion for me, since I'd make a lousy lawyer.)
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by _yosefk 14y ago
I think programming and exercising is healthier than, say, moving. As to legal risks - it's not the programmer who's facing them, it's his employer (which is the same thing for the self-employed programmers, but they're few). A programmer w
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by _yosefk 14y ago
I think "little required education" is true, for programming, in both senses: no certification, and not that much to learn to become productive compared to other professions. As I said in another thread, I think the reason is that the field
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by _yosefk 14y ago
Don't get me wrong - I'm rather paranoid, and I'm not sure at all that this will last. All I'm saying is, the alternatives I know about aren't necessarily better, and if one talks about quitting the field because it's not enjoyable (without
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by _yosefk 14y ago
I think CS education is extremely effective, if one does the exercises himself, and as to software engineering, they don't teach about snake oil, either. It's just that there's not that much to learn that is universally applicable, comparat
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by _yosefk 14y ago
I found much "meaning and passion" in programming after getting into it for the money. Conversely, I know a few people who started programming as kids, and who spent some time fighting depression, unable to feel the same passion as in their
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by _yosefk 14y ago
I said "little or no education" compared to other fields. I'm a grad school dropout, so my bet is that my CS education is above average for a working programmer. A hiring process considered "demanding" (such as Google's) is basically testin
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by _yosefk 14y ago
It's a lot of fun, but not the deciding factor. I have a great gig now, but it won't necessarily last, and I won't necessarily be able to get a similar job (it's in hardware architecture and software tools and there are likely to be less jo
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by _yosefk 14y ago
Why isn't the field extremely competitive now? The demand has been strong for a decade and a half; it seems like a lot of time. (I'm not sure I have an explanation myself, really; perhaps it's something innate in people and perhaps it's som