How others see thee
Came across this editorial page by the senior technology editor at Electronic Design (special section on 'embedded'). Theme is Gresham's Law - bad money drives out the good: applied in his field. Some quips:
..bad managers drive out the good..
Take programmers for instance. They started out coding bit field by bit field, then loosened up a little with assembly and worked at the application level with C and Pascal. Now they're working at the object level with C++ and Java.
Thus programmers now work at higher, more abstract levels. But these languages, coupled with more memory and faster CPUs, have also engendered a lower class of programmers. "We can afford inefficient code", says management, and that's just what it gets. The inefficient, grotesque code now produced in C is truly awesome, and that's nothing compared to what these folks do in C++.
He had a few things to say about hardware too, re HDL's gift to such: programmers as logic designers.
It's hard for HDL designers to visualize datapath flow, roughly 90% of a design. The result is an increasing number of half-baked, inefficient, ineffective designs, sustained by more and more gates and faster logic.
In years past, engineering epitomized careful, elegant design. No more. Bad design, armed with technology and tools, is driving out good design. Before, hardware had the edge over software design. Will hardware and software now compete to see which is worse? Let's add tools to keep the good.
so saith Ray Weiss in 9/3/01 issue.
