How far can stack [LIFO] solve do automatic garbage collection and prevent memory leak ?

John Bokma john at castleamber.com
Tue Aug 24 22:35:39 EDT 2010


Hugh Aguilar <hughaguilar96 at yahoo.com> writes:

> This is also the attitude that I find among college graduates. They
> just believe what their professors told them in college, and there is
> no why.

Which college is that? It doesn't agree with my experiences. In CS quite
a lot has to be proven with a formal proof, exactly the opposite from
what you claim. And after some time students want to see the proof and
certainly don't accept "there is no why!" unless it's a trivial thing.

Maybe it's because your anecdote is an interpretation from a distance,
not based on the actual experience?

> This is essentially the argument being made above --- that C
> is taught in college and Forth is not, therefore C is good and Forth
> is bad --- THERE IS NO WHY!

At an university which languages you see depend a lot on what your
teachers use themselves. A language is just a verhicle to get you from a
to b. What a good study should teach you is how to drive the verhicle
without accidents and not that a red one is the best. From top of my
head I've seen 20+ languages during my study at the University of
Utrecht. Forth wasn't one of them, but I already knew about Forth before
I went to the UU. On top of that I had written an extremely minimalistic
Forth in Z80 assembly years before I went to the UU (based on the work
of someone else).

> People who promote "idiomatic" programming are essentially trying to
> be Yoda. They want to criticize people even when those people's
> programs work.

"Works" doesn't mean that a program is good or what. There is a lot to
say about a program that works, even one that works flawless. I do it
all the time about my own programs. It's good to be critical about your
own work. And if you're a teacher, it's good to provide positive feedback.

> They are just faking up their own expertise ---

Like you, you mean? You consider yourself quite the expert on how people
educate and what they learn when educated in a formal
environment. Without (if I recall correctly) only second hand
information and guessing.

> many of them have never actually written a program that works
> themselves.

Quite some part of CS can be done without writing a single line of code.

> The reason why I like programming is because there is an inherent anti-
> bullshit mechanism in programming. Your program either works or it
> doesn't.

Now can you provide a formal proof that it works, or do you just
consider running the program a few times sufficient proof that "it works"?

> If your program doesn't work, then it doesn't matter if it is
> idiomatic, if you have a college degree, etc., etc.. That is the way I
> see it, anyway.

Well, you see it wrong. A program that doesn't work and is idiomatic is
easier to make work and to verify by others that it works. A program
that's the result of trial-and-error (that's what quite some people end
up doing who are self-taught) is a pain in the ass (pardon my French) to
maintain or to extend.

> This perspective doesn't hold for much on
> comp.lang.forth where we have people endlessly spouting blather
> *about* programming,

and you are different how? Also note that your post is crossposted to
several other groups.

> without actually doing any programming themselves. This is why I don't
> take c.l.f. very seriously; people attack me all of the time and I
> don't really care 

heh, hence all the replies you write, and mentioning it in this post.

-- 
John Bokma                                                               j3b

Blog: http://johnbokma.com/    Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/j.j.j.bokma
    Freelance Perl & Python Development: http://castleamber.com/



More information about the Python-list mailing list