Internet & Technology

by Mike Sterling for Canadian Community News

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The computer industry has grown like a giant all consuming weed!  Most people who dive into the industry don't spend a lot of time doing the 'dirty work' of making things function.  What they do, if they are smart, is to not get into computer programming because the  money is elsewhere.  The money is made by using computer programmers and the smart people know that -- . 

Computer programming at the level that counts is very hard and management is easier and more lucrative.  Doing venture capital is better still.

I remember Dr. Martin Newell of computer graphics fame remarking that large computer programs are the most complex thing ever created by the human mind.  He's right!

I'm in a loose group of people who continue to communicate with one another over decades on computer science, mathematics and physics.  We ask advice and sometimes collaborate.   Many of them have experience that goes back to the 1950's, thus qualifying them as pioneers in the field.   Some are still doing active computer work.

Computer programmers come with different skills.  It's hard for the general public to understand what's going on and there is a reason for that. 

Computer programmers work in obscure languages.  Languages have to be learned.  I don't mean that they are bi-lingual or something like that.  That's easy compared to what experienced programmers have to do.

I'm sick of it, because the learning curve is never over and if anything, it gets steeper. Also, some new things make no sense.  In fact they are illogical. 

I like to do something new and productive for my own purposes.  I have to use languages to do it.  I like to use a language to make something or more accurately to see something.  For an example of that look at the images in the article below:

I'm not interested in learning a new language, but in what was done in the above article, I had to learn three new languages.  I'm not good at learning new  languages and never was. My wiring is scrambled.

I'm not unique.  I asked a friend of mine, Cliff a Computer Scientist, who has worked all over the world to list the number of  languages he has had to learn in his career.  He is a savant at languages and computer science.  When anyone needs advice, Cliff is the man.

He came up with the list below and I added mine.  I merged my list with his.  Can you imagine in your life having to learn all those languages?   Between us we have learned 34 languages and probably forgot some.

I had enough trouble with English, grade school Latin and German.  French --- I could never learn it.

Well, if you have gotten this far and you are sentient, you must be thinking:  "So what?  I hear a thousand tiny violins playing"

It really makes a difference.  Top notch creative people just lose time and energy learning these new languages and how to use them in context, not to mention the operating systems that go with them. 

Between Cliff and I, we can agree that we could have stopped at the language "C" and built around that with extensions.  Just some memory management and not re-inventing the wheel for text processing would have been fine. Extensions for the Internet could have been. done easily.

Now get this!  With the Steve Jobs retro-bios that now abound there is a lot of talk about PIXAR and Toy Story .... the graphics, you  know and big money and Disney with Lucas Films.

Well the hero of all that is Ed Catmull who 'normal' people will never know.  He stopped at Fortran and did all his algorithms in that arcane language and others translated it into what you see on the screen using some of the list below and the Renderman program and successors invented by the people around Ed. 

He refused to try to keep up because he rightly saw it as nonsense and he could do creative work with his toolkit and it was good enough that others had to pick it up and translate it.  He would write about it in algorithmic form in publications like Computer Graphics.  Did Tolstoy translate War and Peace into Hindi?

That's about all I can say about the Tower of Babel.  If I did, it would be in a different language %$#@

Opps, I forgot IBM 1800 assembler and Algol.  I'll add them to the list.  That makes 36  - nope forgot another that I use all the time PHP!  We are at 37 and getting older and older. 

Where have all the languages gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the languages gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the languages gone?
Computer Scientists have picked them every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?

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Wednesday, November 16, 2011