On Thu, 05 Jul 2018 18:40:11 -0700, Jim Lee wrote: > On 07/05/18 18:25, Steven D'Aprano wrote: >> On Thu, 05 Jul 2018 11:27:09 -0700, Jim Lee wrote: >> >>> Take a village of people. They live mostly on wild berries. >> Because of course a community of people living on one food is so >> realistic. Even the Eskimos and Inuit, living in some of the harshest >> environments on earth, managed to have a relatively wide variety of >> foods in their diet. >> >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit_cuisine >> >> > Pedantics again. Didn't even get the point before tearing apart the > *analogy* rather than the *point itself*.
I got the point. The point was "old man yells at clouds". Your point is simply *wrong* -- specialisation is what has created civilization, not generalisation, and your Golden Age when all programmers were "Real Programmers" who could not only optimize code at an expert level in a dozen different language but could probably make their own CPUs using nothing but a handful of sand and a cigarette lighter never actually existed. We are in no danger of losing the ability to optimize code that needs to be optimized, and we're in no danger of being stuck with compiler technology that nobody understands. As cautionary tales go, yours is as sensible as "Stop jumping around, you'll break gravity and we'll all float into space!" There's no shortage of people demanding of their programmers "can't you make it go faster?" and no shortage of people good enough to make it happen. Even if the absolute number of clueless code monkeys has gone up, and although certain areas of the software ecosystem are under assault by cascades of attention-deficit disorder teenagers, the proportion of decent coders has not changed in any meaningful way. There are still enough competent programmers and the average quality of code hasn't gone down, and if the industry as a whole has shifted towards more specialisation and less generalisation, that's a GOOD thing. > Childish. If an analogy is to be treated seriously, it ought to be at least plausible. Yours wasn't. I could have just mocked it mercilessly, but I gave it the benefit of the doubt and treated it seriously and saw where it fell down and failed even the simplest smoke test. Your analogy simply doesn't come close to describing either a realistic scenario or the state of computing in 2018. > The rest was TL;DR. I give you the benefit of the doubt, reading your posts and thinking about them before deciding whether to dismiss them as rubbish or not. You ought to give others the same courtesy. Who knows, you might learn something. -- Steven D'Aprano "Ever since I learned about confirmation bias, I've been seeing it everywhere." -- Jon Ronson -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
