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[Steven D'Aprano]

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