[TUHS] Minimum Array Sizes in 16 bit C (was Maximum)

[Larry McVoy]

On Tue, Oct 01, 2024 at 10:56:13AM -0400, Dan Cross wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 1, 2024 at 10:32???AM Luther Johnson
> <luther.johnson at makerlisp.com> wrote:
> > I think because the of the orders of magnitude increase in the demand
> > for programmers, we now have a very large number of programmers with
> > little or no math and science (and computer science doesn't count in the
> > point I'm trying to make here, if that's your only science, you're not
> > going to have the models in your head from other disciplines to give you
> > useful analogs) background, and that's a big change from 40 years ago.
> > So that has had an effect on who is programming, how they think about
> > it, and how languages have been marketed to that programming audience. IMHO.
> 
> I've found a grounding in mathematics useful for programming, but
> beyond some knowledge of the physical constraints that the universe
> places on us and a very healthy appreciation for the scientific
> method, I'm having a hard time understanding how the hard sciences
> would help out too much. Electrical engineering seems like it would be
> more useful, than, say, chemistry or geology.
> 
> I talk to a lot of academics, and I think they see the situation
> differently than is presented here. In a nutshell, the way a lot of
> them look at it, the amount of computer science in the world increases
> constantly while the amount of time they have to teach that to
> undergraduates remains fixed. As a result, they have to pick and
> choose what they teach very, very carefully, balancing a number of
> criteria as they do so. What this translates to in the real world
> isn't that the bar is lowered, but that the bar is different.

I really wish that they made students take something like the PDP-11
assembly class - it was really systems architecture, you learned the
basic idea of a computer: a CPU, a bus to talk to memory, a bus to 
talk to I/O, how a stack works, ideally how a context switch works
though that kinda blows minds (I personally don't think you are a
kernel programmer if you haven't implemented swtch() or at least 
walked the code and understood all of it).

I did all that and developed a mental model of all computers that
has helped me over the last 4 decades.  Yes, my model is overly
simplistic but it still works, even on the x86 craziness.  I don't
know how you could get to that mental model with x86, x86 is too
weird.  I don't really know which architecture is close to the
simplicity of a PDP-11 today.  Anyone?

If I were teaching it, I'd just get a PDP-11 simulator and teach
on that.   Maybe.
-- 
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Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat