I've seen the New Gen. Most barely know how to
program or tweak existing programs. They've
never writ a client/server app or ANY app. They
think Linux is a disease. They think Python is
an animal and 'C' is a letter of the alphabet.

They are "expert" at using M$/Apple/Goog commercial
apps. That's about it. WHEN it all goes to hell they
will NOT have a backup plan - just to blame M$ or
whatever to keep their jobs.

M$/Apple/Good commercial apps actually DO a lot.
They are also Huge Targets for enemy hacks because
of that. A layered security/backup scheme is the
only way to survive. "Cloud" - not nearly as
secure/robust as they think. They WILL put
EVERYTHING there - and LOSE it.

We who deal with programming, systems-level stuff,
we KNOW. The new gen, and the pointy-haired bosses
who believe in whatever "Modern Management Mag"
says, are SO seriously deluded. "Appearances" are
all that counts. Alas, by deflecting blame, they'll
likely survive - apparently that's the Alpha/Omega.

I spent over 40 years finding out How Things
Really Work and putting that to best advantage
for "The Cause". From Assembler/DOS/Win/Linux
to the latest stuff, I just *had* to know what
made it tick. What was great, what was crap, what
was Armageddon.

Do I sound bitter ? Well, that's not really the
right mindset ... it's more "despondent", seeing
how far standards have fallen and where it leads.

Oh well, I'll get my pension and SS checks - might
even make more money than before - but now whatever
happens isn't MY fault anymore. I can do the
blame-displacement game too - and with solid creds.

Until it penetrates my pension/SS stuff. THEN it's
gonna be bad. Oh well, that's what LAWYERS are
for ... sue the fuckers for ten times the damages ....

On Thu, 7 Dec 2023 03:12:19 -0500
"56g.1173" <56g.1173@ztq9.net> wrote:

> I've seen the New Gen. Most barely know how to
> program or tweak existing programs. They've
> never writ a client/server app or ANY app. They
> think Linux is a disease. They think Python is
> an animal and 'C' is a letter of the alphabet.

You have seen a corner - there are many real programmers still and
some very good young ones, I've found them everywhere I've worked including
my CPOE. There's also a large bunch of design pattern afflicted programmers
(mostly in the "Enterprise Java" world) who write the most incomprehensible
code I've ever seen - but it works!

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith
Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/
Host: Beautiful Theory meet Inconvenient Fact
Obit: Beautiful Theory died today of factual inconsistency

Loosely(?) related:

Jonathan Blow (Thekla, Inc)
Preventing the Collapse of Civilization /
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko

Smarter Every Day 293
I Was SCARED To Say This To NASA... (But I said it anyway)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU

--
1. Hitchhiker 0: (5) Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd
all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place.
And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one
should ever have left the oceans.

On 07/12/2023 14:43, yeti wrote:
> Loosely(?) related:
>
> Jonathan Blow (Thekla, Inc)
> Preventing the Collapse of Civilization /
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko
>
> Smarter Every Day 293
> I Was SCARED To Say This To NASA... (But I said it anyway)
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU
>

I have renamed IT to DIT. DisInformation technology.

--
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will
eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such
time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic
and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally
important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for
the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the
truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

Joseph Goebbels

On 2023-12-07, Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> wrote:
> On Thu, 7 Dec 2023 03:12:19 -0500
> "56g.1173" <56g.1173@ztq9.net> wrote:
>
>> I've seen the New Gen. Most barely know how to
>> program or tweak existing programs. They've
>> never writ a client/server app or ANY app. They
>> think Linux is a disease. They think Python is
>> an animal and 'C' is a letter of the alphabet.
>
> You have seen a corner - there are many real programmers still and
> some very good young ones, I've found them everywhere I've worked including
> my CPOE. There's also a large bunch of design pattern afflicted programmers
> (mostly in the "Enterprise Java" world) who write the most incomprehensible
> code I've ever seen - but it works!

I work in a very small team, but I'll supply another
counterexample. There's a new guy on the team I work in. He was
hired right out of college. I think it has been less than two
years that he has been on the team. He was sharp to begin with,
but at this point his skills have sharpened to the point that if
the two of us were interviewing for the same job, I'd give him
better than even odds.

--
Robert Riches
spamtrap42@jacob21819.net
(Yes, that is one of my email addresses.)

On 12/7/23 3:53 AM, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
> On Thu, 7 Dec 2023 03:12:19 -0500
> "56g.1173" <56g.1173@ztq9.net> wrote:
>
>> I've seen the New Gen. Most barely know how to
>> program or tweak existing programs. They've
>> never writ a client/server app or ANY app. They
>> think Linux is a disease. They think Python is
>> an animal and 'C' is a letter of the alphabet.
>
> You have seen a corner - there are many real programmers still and
> some very good young ones, I've found them everywhere I've worked including
> my CPOE. There's also a large bunch of design pattern afflicted programmers
> (mostly in the "Enterprise Java" world) who write the most incomprehensible
> code I've ever seen - but it works!

I know there are still many "real programmers". The ISSUE
is that they're no longer in the biz/service ranks. This
has been taken over by M$/Apple/Goog supplicants who don't
know much beyond how to spend more $$$ with those corps
for their wunnerful (now mostly cloud/pay-per-byte)
offerings.

On 12/7/23 10:51 PM, Robert Riches wrote:
> On 2023-12-07, Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> wrote:
>> On Thu, 7 Dec 2023 03:12:19 -0500
>> "56g.1173" <56g.1173@ztq9.net> wrote:
>>
>>> I've seen the New Gen. Most barely know how to
>>> program or tweak existing programs. They've
>>> never writ a client/server app or ANY app. They
>>> think Linux is a disease. They think Python is
>>> an animal and 'C' is a letter of the alphabet.
>>
>> You have seen a corner - there are many real programmers still and
>> some very good young ones, I've found them everywhere I've worked including
>> my CPOE. There's also a large bunch of design pattern afflicted programmers
>> (mostly in the "Enterprise Java" world) who write the most incomprehensible
>> code I've ever seen - but it works!
>
> I work in a very small team, but I'll supply another
> counterexample. There's a new guy on the team I work in. He was
> hired right out of college. I think it has been less than two
> years that he has been on the team. He was sharp to begin with,
> but at this point his skills have sharpened to the point that if
> the two of us were interviewing for the same job, I'd give him
> better than even odds.

But ... how COMMON is this ???

Most biz/etc these days want 'cloud app' experts who
are only good at finding/negotiating licenses with a
few Big Tech entities.

This is what I'VE seen.

And they don't know DICK about computers, only about
those rip-off 'services'.

Oh well, won't be long before China/Russia/etc make
that 'cloud' seriously unreliable. THEN what ? Backup
plans ? NONE !

Shit, three recent applicants didn't even know what
DHCP was for/did ... and yet ALMOST made the cut ....

'Dilbert' was prophecy.

And I retired at JUST the right time .....

There are programmers/system-people who are MUCH
better than I am - the geeks who burn a gram+ of
caffeine and 2000 cals of sugar doughnuts every day.
In my time IT was mostly self-taught. You started
with PETSs/VICs/Atari's/C64s and found it all out
on your own. College-level was WAY too abstract for
most practical uses beyond mainframes at NASA.
HATED punch-cards.

Some of the Linux mags of the past had articles
by Linus's kernel guys - showed how DEEP it gets.
Also showed how Linus would fight to keep things
sane and consistent.

HOW many today have EVER done assembler-level
programming ? Know ANYTHING about how cpu's
memory, peripherials, talk to each other ?
Shit, how many know what an OS actually DOES ?
They exist, fer sure, but they're mostly no
longer where they're most NEEDED - out in
the pubic ranks, innovating, keeping it sane.

On 12/7/23 11:48 AM, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
> On 07/12/2023 14:43, yeti wrote:
>> Loosely(?) related:
>>
>> Jonathan Blow (Thekla, Inc)
>> Preventing the Collapse of Civilization /
>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko
>>
>> Smarter Every Day 293
>> I Was SCARED To Say This To NASA... (But I said it anyway)
>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU
>>
>
> I have renamed IT to DIT. DisInformation technology.

Well, that's become a significant part of it :-)

But not the whole thing.

I'm more worried about the private/corp/govt
shops where nobody seems to KNOW anything about
computers or programming or much of ANYTHING
anymore beyond how to spend big $$$ with M$
or Goog or Apple for some neo metered client/server
model from the 60s/70s.

ENEMIES, real enemies, are keen to - and likely
now CAN - take that shit DOWN in an instant if
the poop ever hits the proverbial propeller. Too
many of the New Guys have NO contingency plans
other than to blame M$ and friends.

"Not MY fault !"

Yes, it IS your fault ... and that of the pointy-
haired bosses who hired you ...........

Robert Riches <spamtrap42@jacob21819.net> writes:
> Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> wrote:
>> On Thu, 7 Dec 2023 03:12:19 -0500
>> "56g.1173" <56g.1173@ztq9.net> wrote:
>>
>>> I've seen the New Gen. Most barely know how to
>>> program or tweak existing programs. They've
>>> never writ a client/server app or ANY app. They
>>> think Linux is a disease. They think Python is
>>> an animal and 'C' is a letter of the alphabet.
>>
>> You have seen a corner - there are many real programmers still and
>> some very good young ones, I've found them everywhere I've worked
>> including my CPOE. There's also a large bunch of design pattern
>> afflicted programmers (mostly in the "Enterprise Java" world) who
>> write the most incomprehensible code I've ever seen - but it works!
>
> I work in a very small team, but I'll supply another counterexample.
> There's a new guy on the team I work in. He was hired right out of
> college. I think it has been less than two years that he has been on
> the team. He was sharp to begin with, but at this point his skills
> have sharpened to the point that if the two of us were interviewing
> for the same job, I'd give him better than even odds.

Agreed, we’ve had some excellent graduate hires over the last couple of
years. If anything it’s been harder to hire good people into the more
senior roles than junior.

Every generation has some people whinging about the younger ones,
oblivious to the fact that analogous complaints were made about their
own generation a few decades earlier. At a certain point you realize
it’s all hot air.

--
https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/

On Fri, 8 Dec 2023 00:41:52 -0500
"56g.1173" <56g.1173@ztq9.net> wrote:

> And I retired at JUST the right time .....

Nah I'm sticking around for a few more years yet, it's still fun.

> There are programmers/system-people who are MUCH
> better than I am - the geeks who burn a gram+ of
> caffeine and 2000 cals of sugar doughnuts every day.

That went out of fashion some time ago, when people finally
realised that you don't get more done that way. The BASIC for the Camputers
Lynx was written by someone like that 16K of Z80 Assembler and *NO*
meaningful comments. It worked but it was completely unmaintainable.

> In my time IT was mostly self-taught. You started
> with PETSs/VICs/Atari's/C64s and found it all out

Sounds like your time was a little after mine, but not much.

> on your own. College-level was WAY too abstract for
> most practical uses beyond mainframes at NASA.
> HATED punch-cards.

The computer science I learned at college has stood me in good
stead ever since.

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith
Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/
Host: Beautiful Theory meet Inconvenient Fact
Obit: Beautiful Theory died today of factual inconsistency

On Fri, 08 Dec 2023 08:29:58 +0000
Richard Kettlewell <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote:

> Every generation has some people whinging about the younger ones,
> oblivious to the fact that analogous complaints were made about their
> own generation a few decades earlier. At a certain point you realize
> it’s all hot air.

There are surviving complaints about the deficiencies of the youth
of today from Roman times.

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith
Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/
Host: Beautiful Theory meet Inconvenient Fact
Obit: Beautiful Theory died today of factual inconsistency

2023-12-08, Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> schrieb:
> On Fri, 08 Dec 2023 08:29:58 +0000
> Richard Kettlewell <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>
>> Every generation has some people whinging about the younger ones,
>> oblivious to the fact that analogous complaints were made about their
>> own generation a few decades earlier. At a certain point you realize
>> it???s all hot air.
>
> There are surviving complaints about the deficiencies of the youth
> of today from Roman times.

Yes, but the Romans were probably right when complaining about the youth
being bad programmers.

--
Jan v/d Broek
balglaas@dds.nl
Look out, here he comes again
The kid with the replaceable head

On Fri, 8 Dec 2023 09:09:14 +0000, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:

> On Fri, 8 Dec 2023 00:41:52 -0500 "56g.1173" <56g.1173@ztq9.net> wrote:
>
>> And I retired at JUST the right time .....
>
> Nah I'm sticking around for a few more years yet, it's still fun.
>
>> There are programmers/system-people who are MUCH better than I am -
>> the geeks who burn a gram+ of caffeine and 2000 cals of sugar
>> doughnuts every day.
>
> That went out of fashion some time ago, when people finally
> realised that you don't get more done that way. The BASIC for the
> Camputers Lynx was written by someone like that 16K of Z80 Assembler and
> *NO* meaningful comments. It worked but it was completely
> unmaintainable.
>
>> In my time IT was mostly self-taught. You started with
>> PETSs/VICs/Atari's/C64s and found it all out
>
> Sounds like your time was a little after mine, but not much.
>
Same here. Learnt Algol 60 at uni where I was using the University's only
student computer (Elliott 503 - look THAT up!), went straight into a one
of ICL's computer bureaus (ICL 1902 mainframe where I was taught assembler
and wrote that for 2-3 years before we switched to COBOL and using the
George 3 OS in the late '60s. Mostly wrote that on 1900s and 2900s until I
joined Logica in the mid 80s (so got into using fault-tolerant kit:
Tandem, Stratus, as well as minicomputers NCR Unix and IBM AS/400s until
Logica imploded in 2001.

Learning Algol 60 followed by COBOL as my first programming languages
almost certainly gave me a better grounding in designing, writing and
implementing systems in well-structured code than learning BASIC as my
first language would have. I'm certain that it also helped me get into
database design and implementation to have done that in a 2900 with IDMSX.

> The computer science I learned at college has stood me in good
> stead ever since.

Snap.

--

Martin | martin at
Gregorie | gregorie dot org

On Fri, 8 Dec 2023 00:49:15 -0500, 56g.1173 wrote:

> But not the whole thing.
>
> I'm more worried about the private/corp/govt shops where nobody seems
> to KNOW anything about computers or programming or much of ANYTHING
> anymore beyond how to spend big $$$ with M$
> or Goog or Apple for some neo metered client/server model from the
> 60s/70s.
>
> ENEMIES, real enemies, are keen to - and likely now CAN - take that
> shit DOWN in an instant if the poop ever hits the proverbial
> propeller. Too many of the New Guys have NO contingency plans other
> than to blame M$ and friends.
>
> "Not MY fault !"
>
> Yes, it IS your fault ... and that of the pointy- haired bosses who
> hired you ...........

Agreed. If you fail to adequately deal with any aspect of application
design and documentation, system architecture, performance, error
detection and recovery, software design, including adequate error
detection and recovery and, for non-trivial applications fail to have the
client build and USE adequate acceptance tests, then you and your
management have failed and deserve all the grief that comes your way.

The prime example of how not to do all of the above correctly is the UK
Post Office Horizon screw-up.

--

Martin | martin at
Gregorie | gregorie dot org

On Fri, 8 Dec 2023 13:02:43 -0000 (UTC)
Martin Gregorie <martin@mydomain.invalid> wrote:

> On Fri, 8 Dec 2023 09:09:14 +0000, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
>
> > On Fri, 8 Dec 2023 00:41:52 -0500 "56g.1173" <56g.1173@ztq9.net> wrote:
> >
> >> And I retired at JUST the right time .....
> >
> > Nah I'm sticking around for a few more years yet, it's still
> > fun.
> >
> >> There are programmers/system-people who are MUCH better than I am -
> >> the geeks who burn a gram+ of caffeine and 2000 cals of sugar
> >> doughnuts every day.
> >
> > That went out of fashion some time ago, when people finally
> > realised that you don't get more done that way. The BASIC for the
> > Camputers Lynx was written by someone like that 16K of Z80 Assembler and
> > *NO* meaningful comments. It worked but it was completely
> > unmaintainable.
> >
> >> In my time IT was mostly self-taught. You started with
> >> PETSs/VICs/Atari's/C64s and found it all out
> >
> > Sounds like your time was a little after mine, but not much.
> >

and yours sounds a little earlier still.

> Same here. Learnt Algol 60 at uni where I was using the University's only

Good start! I learned BASIC at school, then taught myself FORTRAN
and IBM 1130 Assembler then learned COBOL in an A level course before going
to college and getting taught Algol-W, BCPL and a heap of a lot of other
languages. I really liked BCPL.

> student computer (Elliott 503 - look THAT up!), went straight into a one
> of ICL's computer bureaus (ICL 1902 mainframe where I was taught

I went straight into a startup producing a CP/M machine based on
the Beebon and my own Z80 card (Acorn's would have been too late).

> Learning Algol 60 followed by COBOL as my first programming languages
> almost certainly gave me a better grounding in designing, writing and
> implementing systems in well-structured code than learning BASIC as my

Very much so - I had a lot of unlearning to do. OTOH I really
appreciated how much help proper structure was.

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith
Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/
Host: Beautiful Theory meet Inconvenient Fact
Obit: Beautiful Theory died today of factual inconsistency

On 08/12/2023 08:29, Richard Kettlewell wrote:
> Robert Riches <spamtrap42@jacob21819.net> writes:
>> Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> wrote:
>>> On Thu, 7 Dec 2023 03:12:19 -0500
>>> "56g.1173" <56g.1173@ztq9.net> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I've seen the New Gen. Most barely know how to
>>>> program or tweak existing programs. They've
>>>> never writ a client/server app or ANY app. They
>>>> think Linux is a disease. They think Python is
>>>> an animal and 'C' is a letter of the alphabet.
>>>
>>> You have seen a corner - there are many real programmers still and
>>> some very good young ones, I've found them everywhere I've worked
>>> including my CPOE. There's also a large bunch of design pattern
>>> afflicted programmers (mostly in the "Enterprise Java" world) who
>>> write the most incomprehensible code I've ever seen - but it works!
>>
>> I work in a very small team, but I'll supply another counterexample.
>> There's a new guy on the team I work in. He was hired right out of
>> college. I think it has been less than two years that he has been on
>> the team. He was sharp to begin with, but at this point his skills
>> have sharpened to the point that if the two of us were interviewing
>> for the same job, I'd give him better than even odds.
>
> Agreed, we’ve had some excellent graduate hires over the last couple of
> years. If anything it’s been harder to hire good people into the more
> senior roles than junior.
>
> Every generation has some people whinging about the younger ones,
> oblivious to the fact that analogous complaints were made about their
> own generation a few decades earlier. At a certain point you realize
> it’s all hot air.
>
Not all hot air. I remember hiring you and you were absolutely
exceptional. Far too many other people simply were 'Ok-ish' and could
fiddle with Windows and eventually make it work, but had no real clue
beyond that. The problem is that in any generation there are a few
exceptionals and a thousand 'ok, with the right training' . But if they
don't get the right training, they are to put it bluntly, a fucking
liability.

It boils down to how to you take a bunch of people who are intelligent,
but not exceptional, and get productive work out of them. And the answer
is things like WordPress, or Visual Basic, Python or whatever the
latests 'framework' is that allows them to build stuff *without really
understanding what they are doing*. And create an industrial *system* of
quality control that tests everything they do until their 'random
monkey' approach - I think you called it 'cargo culting' - produces
something that actually works.

--
There’s a mighty big difference between good, sound reasons and reasons
that sound good.

Burton Hillis (William Vaughn, American columnist)

On Fri, 8 Dec 2023 13:19:17 -0000 (UTC)
Martin Gregorie <martin@mydomain.invalid> wrote:

> detection and recovery and, for non-trivial applications fail to have the
> client build and USE adequate acceptance tests,

I recall getting a lot of push back on that from an internal
customer - right up until a misunderstanding of the requirements resulted
in a production disaster - *then* they got the point and got all
enthusiastic about acceptance testing.

That was a very well run project - we designed APIs first as a
group and then one engineer went off to write tests and another to write
the implementation (the competitive aspect of this was really helpful,
you really pay attention when you know someone good is trying to break
your code). When test met code we found the places where the design was
insufficiently clear.

I've advocated this approach ever since but there's a modern mantra
that the developer should write the tests - IMHO this is wrong because then
tester and writer share blind spots.

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith
Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/
Host: Beautiful Theory meet Inconvenient Fact
Obit: Beautiful Theory died today of factual inconsistency

The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> writes:
> On 08/12/2023 08:29, Richard Kettlewell wrote:
>> Agreed, we’ve had some excellent graduate hires over the last couple
>> of years. If anything it’s been harder to hire good people into the
>> more senior roles than junior. Every generation has some people
>> whinging about the younger ones, oblivious to the fact that analogous
>> complaints were made about their own generation a few decades
>> earlier. At a certain point you realize it’s all hot air.
>
> Not all hot air. I remember hiring you and you were absolutely
> exceptional. Far too many other people simply were 'Ok-ish' and could
> fiddle with Windows and eventually make it work, but had no real clue
> beyond that. The problem is that in any generation there are a few
> exceptionals and a thousand 'ok, with the right training' . But if
> they don't get the right training, they are to put it bluntly, a
> fucking liability.

Right, I don’t think the balance between the exceptional and the
adequate has substantially changed, certainly not since the 1990s and
probably not since the 1590s.

Look at the annual intake of, I dunno, a Tudor-era shipyard and I’d
expect to find a handful people who take to the work like they were born
to it, and a much larger number of people who could knock together some
planks with a bit of supervision and inspection.

The thing that’s hot air is the claim that there’s some kind of
generational difference involved.

--
https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/

On Fri, 8 Dec 2023 14:21:21 +0000, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:

> On Fri, 8 Dec 2023 13:19:17 -0000 (UTC)
> Martin Gregorie <martin@mydomain.invalid> wrote:
>
>> detection and recovery and, for non-trivial applications fail to have
>> the client build and USE adequate acceptance tests,
>
> I recall getting a lot of push back on that from an internal
> customer - right up until a misunderstanding of the requirements
> resulted in a production disaster - *then* they got the point and got
> all enthusiastic about acceptance testing.
>
> That was a very well run project - we designed APIs first as a
> group and then one engineer went off to write tests and another to write
> the implementation (the competitive aspect of this was really helpful,
> you really pay attention when you know someone good is trying to break
> your code). When test met code we found the places where the design was
> insufficiently clear.
>
Sounds like good practise.

The approach that Logica used, at least in its finance divison, and for
large financial networks, such as CHAPS, was that, once the requirements
and detailed specifications had been agreed and signed off by both the
development team and the client, the development team got on with writing
the detailed specs, development, and the system tests prior to delivery.
Meanwhile, the client specified and then implemented their acceptance test
suite without reference to the developers - unless of course, their work
discovered cases not covered in the system specs.

The system was delivered to the client after we'd got clean runs through
our system tests. At this point the client ran it their acceptance test
suite: it wasn't signed off as complete and ready for live operation until
it had passed all their acceptance tests.

--

Martin | martin at
Gregorie | gregorie dot org

On 08/12/2023 15:20, Richard Kettlewell wrote:
> The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> writes:
>> On 08/12/2023 08:29, Richard Kettlewell wrote:
>>> Agreed, we’ve had some excellent graduate hires over the last couple
>>> of years. If anything it’s been harder to hire good people into the
>>> more senior roles than junior. Every generation has some people
>>> whinging about the younger ones, oblivious to the fact that analogous
>>> complaints were made about their own generation a few decades
>>> earlier. At a certain point you realize it’s all hot air.
>>
>> Not all hot air. I remember hiring you and you were absolutely
>> exceptional. Far too many other people simply were 'Ok-ish' and could
>> fiddle with Windows and eventually make it work, but had no real clue
>> beyond that. The problem is that in any generation there are a few
>> exceptionals and a thousand 'ok, with the right training' . But if
>> they don't get the right training, they are to put it bluntly, a
>> fucking liability.
>
> Right, I don’t think the balance between the exceptional and the
> adequate has substantially changed, certainly not since the 1990s and
> probably not since the 1590s.
>
> Look at the annual intake of, I dunno, a Tudor-era shipyard and I’d
> expect to find a handful people who take to the work like they were born
> to it, and a much larger number of people who could knock together some
> planks with a bit of supervision and inspection.
>
> The thing that’s hot air is the claim that there’s some kind of
> generational difference involved.
>
Agreed. But I think that there is a difference, though I am not sure
that I would call it generational. Its more just an 'autre temps, autre
moeurs'

Viz I grew up in the shadow of WWII. Barnes Wallis lived down the road,
and the Vickers aircraft company was a big employer. Overhead V bombers
were a daily occurrence and the village boasted a house that used to
belong to Tommy Sopwith, of Camel fame and was in fact later bought by
Harry Hawker, of Hawker aircraft, Down the road was where Willian of
Occam was born (as well as Eric Clapton) and the Tyrell formula one
racing team.

Britain was the second nation in the world to have developed the atomic
bomb, and the jet engine the first to have developed the magnetron
radar, cracked the Enigma code etc etc etc.

These were not despised as the product of 'white male science', nor yet
were they dismissed as irrelevant or socially dangerous. They were seen
as triumphs of traditional education and bloody hard work.

In short, Boffins had won the bloody war and were held in some kind of
awe, and they in turn felt a deep sense of responsibility to make sure
that the promised better lives that people had been promised, happened.
The BBC was staffed with many people who had been through hell and
emerged the other side humbler older and wiser.

All that has now gone. My Ex BIL and I had a conversation a few months
ago. He is a German. 'In Germany we have two professors of nuclear
physics and 102 professors of gender studies'.

I am constantly informed that all my science and engineering knowledge
is 'just my opinion' and that what is true is 'what 98% of people
believe to be true', and my critique of *renewable energy* makes me a
'climate denier' and an 'oil company shill'

Meanwhile the police won't listen to me unless I am a 'victim' . Or an
'oppressed minority' of some sort.

In short all the respect for traditional things that helped bind and
construct the post war society have ben shredded by - well its easy to
say 'socialists' - but its close enough.

We are feeding the laziness, the stupidity, the egotism, the banality,
and cancelling anyone who tries to make a serious point. And that has
lead to a generation that are not innately any more stupid than they
always were, but where the best way to get ahead is to behave like an
utter dickhead. To not learn mathematics and science, but to become a
fuckwitted Celebrity, and marry a Prince.

To go to Uni and get a Degree, based neither on native genius, nor on
hard work absorbing some useful skill, but rather on the regurgitation
of what some chippy left wing self styled intellectual has decreed to be
'how things ought to be' and the rewriting of the historical narrative
to justify it.

And then because you haven't a qualification worth a shit, to complain
that you are being 'discriminated' against in favour of someone who
actually shows some competence and skill.

If that's what people want, all well and good, but they should not then
complain when nothing works anymore.

When they get sold lipstick for pigs, cant afford a house, and are
seeing their standard of living eroding in real terms back to the sort
of standards it was in the 1950s.

This crappy software is simply another symptom of that. Born and brought
up to not have to work that hard for the basics of life, they take it
all for granted and urinate on anyone 'boring' enough to think it
important enough to make a career in.

In short todays world IS different from the 1950s, in that people do not
settle for nice houses, a steady productive job and a family, because
they didn't spend the last decade having the crap bombed out of them.
They do nor respect boffins and scientists as the people who stopped the
crap being bombed out of them, but call them geeks and borderline
autistics and laugh at them despise them and socially cancel them for
'not being where it's at'.

And because people have been successful at that ploy, the inevitable
result is that the world that we built in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, is
falling apart at the seams, and everyone is rushing around blaming
everyone else and no one is rolling up their sleeves to fix it.

Its probably simply part of a sociological cycle. The success of the
feudal system and mass employment in agriculture and the rising tide of
globalism lead to the Black Death, the death of huge numbers of people,
a widespread deepening of distrust, if not in God, at least in priests,
and the [partial] emancipation of the peasant.

The onset of the industrial revolution and its comcomitant rise in per
capita energy use, led to the rise of enormous population levels and
unheard of standards of living, and well as more silliness than the
world had ever seen. The rise of globalism is now accompanied by the
rapid spread of pandemics, just as in the 14th century, and in mass
migration of the unskilled and uncivilised, , which creates an
unsustainable strain on the living standards of the indigenous populations.

*shrug*. That's the modern morality, as delivered by the Precious
Priests of Progressivity.
I cant stop it, and I am almost too old to give a fuck these days. The
reality of dynamic systems like societies, is that no one has any real
power to modify them. Only to chart their downfall.

The past was Empire, common wealth, democracy and trade, the Future is
the EU, Putin, Oppression and Slavery.

Because people have simply forgotten how shit life can be, when someone
comes along with a gun and cant stand the sound of yiur whining about
'Yuman Rites' and 'fairness' and decides the pragmatic solution is to
put a .22 round between your eyes.

--
Climate is what you expect but weather is what you get.
Mark Twain

On 08 Dec 2023 at 13:02:43 GMT, "Martin Gregorie" <martin@mydomain.invalid>
wrote:

> Learnt Algol 60 at uni where I was using the University's only
> student computer (Elliott 503 - look THAT up!)

The one I used was at Imperial. Where was yours?

--
Tim

On 08/12/2023 16:51, TimS wrote:
> On 08 Dec 2023 at 13:02:43 GMT, "Martin Gregorie" <martin@mydomain.invalid>
> wrote:
>
>> Learnt Algol 60 at uni where I was using the University's only
>> student computer (Elliott 503 - look THAT up!)
>
> The one I used was at Imperial. Where was yours?
>
I think Cambridge had one.

Oh. Apparntly not...

"The first computer at the University of Cambridge was EDSAC 1, a
computer designed and built by the University's Mathematical Laboratory.
It ran its first program in May 1949, and was one of the first computers
in the world to store its program in memory, rather than with hard
wiring. It was also unusual in being designed to be used by scientists.
Scientists from many disciplines used it, but for this history
particular record should be made of calculations on the band structure
of aluminium contained in Prof Volker Heine's PhD thesis (submitted June
1956) for which he used EDSAC 1.

EDSAC 1 was replaced by EDSAC 2 in 1958, which was in turn replaced by
TITAN in 1964/1965. TITAN was the first computer in Cambridge to support
high-level languages, such as Fortran. In 1970 the Mathematical
Laboratory divided to become the Computer Laboratory and the Computing
Service, the latter now being called the UIS. In 1971 an IBM 370/165
("Phoenix") was installed. This was upgraded twice, to an IBM 3081D in
1982, and then finally to a 3084Q in 1989, before being decomissioned in
1995.

The Titan was a modified ferranti ATLAS 2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(1963_computer)

--
Truth welcomes investigation because truth knows investigation will lead
to converts. It is deception that uses all the other techniques.

On 2023-12-08, Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> wrote:

> The computer science I learned at college has stood me in good
> stead ever since.

For me, the nice thing about the university courses was the access
it gave me to computers, although through a family connection I had
gotten my hands on a couple of small office machines before that.
The first machine I actually played with (at the tender age of 15)
was a Univac 1004, a hopped-up electronic version of the IBM 407,
so I even got a taste of plugboard wiring.

Alongside university course assignments, I wrote a lot of fun programs
for myself, and learned as much from that as from the actual courses.
However, disenchantment set in when I realized how far Computer Science
was from the Real World [TM] (at the time, the CS department was still
under the department of mathematics). Pretty soon it turned into a
lot of airy-fairy theoretical stuff (one course hit you with a new
programming language every two weeks), with a lot of time spent
contemplating the whichness of what with no practical applications.
Meanwhile, I found I enjoyed getting down to the metal with assembly
language, which didn't go over well with the faculty.

Fortunately, between my second and third years, I managed to land
a part-time job programming at a small service bureau. That's when
the real learning began. When it came time to go back for a third
year of university, I arranged my schedule so that I had Thursdays
off. I worked at that service bureau on those days, while during
the rest of the week my disenchantment with Computer Science deepened,
and I discovered that theoretical math really wasn't my forte.
At the end of my third year (a disaster aside from the programming
part), I dropped out, went on full time with the service bureau,
and have been programming real-world applications ever since.

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | The Internet is like a big city:
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | it has plenty of bright lights and
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | excitement, but also dark alleys
/ \ if you read it the right way. | down which the unwary get mugged.

On 2023-12-08, Martin Gregorie <martin@mydomain.invalid> wrote:

> On Fri, 8 Dec 2023 00:49:15 -0500, 56g.1173 wrote:
>
>> But not the whole thing.
>>
>> I'm more worried about the private/corp/govt shops where nobody seems
>> to KNOW anything about computers or programming or much of ANYTHING
>> anymore beyond how to spend big $$$ with M$
>> or Goog or Apple for some neo metered client/server model from the
>> 60s/70s.
>>
>> ENEMIES, real enemies, are keen to - and likely now CAN - take that
>> shit DOWN in an instant if the poop ever hits the proverbial
>> propeller. Too many of the New Guys have NO contingency plans other
>> than to blame M$ and friends.
>>
>> "Not MY fault !"

I've always said that this will be the epitaph of our society
(spoken in a nasal whine, of course).

>> Yes, it IS your fault ... and that of the pointy- haired bosses who
>> hired you ...........
>
> Agreed. If you fail to adequately deal with any aspect of application
> design and documentation, system architecture, performance, error
> detection and recovery, software design, including adequate error
> detection and recovery and, for non-trivial applications fail to have
> the client build and USE adequate acceptance tests, then you and your
> management have failed and deserve all the grief that comes your way.

Two words: shit happens. Those who refuse to believe this should
get what's coming to them - but unfortunately too often don't.

It matters not if you win or lose, but how you lay the blame.

> The prime example of how not to do all of the above correctly is the UK
> Post Office Horizon screw-up.

Is that anything like the Canadian Phoenix federal payroll screw-up?

I've always said that payrolls should never have been computerized,
because computers are logical and payrolls aren't. But people have
become so enamoured with complexity - confusing it with sophistication -
that things become messy very quickly.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more
to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | The Internet is like a big city:
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | it has plenty of bright lights and
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | excitement, but also dark alleys
/ \ if you read it the right way. | down which the unwary get mugged.

On 2023-12-08, Jan van den Broek <balglaas@dds.nl> wrote:

> 2023-12-08, Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> schrieb:
>
>> On Fri, 08 Dec 2023 08:29:58 +0000
>> Richard Kettlewell <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>>
>>> Every generation has some people whinging about the younger ones,
>>> oblivious to the fact that analogous complaints were made about their
>>> own generation a few decades earlier. At a certain point you realize
>>> it???s all hot air.
>>
>> There are surviving complaints about the deficiencies of the youth
>> of today from Roman times.
>
> Yes, but the Romans were probably right when complaining about the youth
> being bad programmers.

Give them a break, programming in Roman numerals was a bitch.

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | The Internet is like a big city:
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | it has plenty of bright lights and
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | excitement, but also dark alleys
/ \ if you read it the right way. | down which the unwary get mugged.