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Showing content with the highest reputation on 04/11/2011 in all areas

  1. Yesterday day at work our software manager, a long time text based programmer, can into the office where we sat and declared, "You win. I admit it." We asked what he meant and he said that he just realized that he had programmed graphically in his text based language (FORTH). It seems that he was doing some coding for a piece of test code for an embedded system that would place 16 values on a bus and toggle a read/write line for each bus value. Desiring to keep the code as simple as possible, i.e. no loops, he simply coded it direcly like the pseudo-code below: Write value 1 to busToggle lineWrite value 2 to busToggle line....Write value 16 to busToggle line Since the toggling of the line was being control by direct setting of a registry bit, he realized that he could simply make a macro to lay down that code. Of course now he needed a name for the macro, and since FORTH would let him use any characters other than colon, period, space, & a couple of similar ones and he desired that it should be clear that the code was test only he chose to name it "_/~\_" for easy identification. (This is a square wave in ASCII) The compiler was of course happy with this since one binary pattern is as good as another to a computer. He continued along happy completing the inital version of his code then broke for lunch quite happy with himself for his creative naming. At this time I do have to say he has taken LabVIEW Basics I & II so that he can assist with code reviews but preferred text based programming over graphical. For time to time we (the LV programmers) and he/them (the text based programmers) have engaged in good natured ribbing for fun. Back to the story, after lunch our happy text based programmer sits down with his test code to continue development. Looking at his code he thinks to himself, "how clever I am to have used a picture of a square wave for my macro's name." It is at this point he realizes that he has started graphical programming just like LabVIEW. Seeing that he doesn't want to wait until WE realize this during a code review or debug session because that would give us too much fuel for the ribbing, he opts for the only honorable thing......."Admit that graphical programming wins." After having seen so many "LabVIEW Sucks" type of posts over the years, I just had to share this story. One interesting though we had in talking about this though.....to the computer using a series of bits read as text by humans to represent a "block of code" is no different than using a series of bits read as a picture by humans to represent a "block of code". The difference ultimately exists in the mind of the programmer not in the language/computer constructs. Jason
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