Re: The problem with not owning the software

On Fri, 1/3/2025 6:28 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Fri, 3 Jan 2025 09:09:35 -0500, Paul wrote:
 

People using Office, there is an amazing range of skills.
>
We make fun of the people, who can barely tie their own shoe laces using
computers. But there are also those, who win programming contests, who
can run circles around you.

 
Using Excel? I’d go up against a champion Excel user, armed only with
Python and Jupyter, and I would likely show them a thing or two.
 

The masters graduate had been working on some sort of behavioral
electrical model and doing convolution, and had been at it for six weeks.
The senior manager, finished the project in two days and had the
program deliver the results as a graph with the electrical waveform in it.
And the waveform was updating as the data became available in the
spreadsheet. I doubt the objective of the Fortran program, was
to draw a graph of the results. It was just to calculate the
data points for further post-analysis.

One of the reasons we occasionally wrote things in Fortran, was
hardware engineers would get together and compare notes, and
if they needed to collaborate on programming something, many
times Fortran was the only thing they had in common. This happened,
because the Universities at the time, taught Fortran. We were the
Fortran generation. And we used to laugh about this, the absurdity
of "well, we don't have any language other than Fortran, so
Fortran it is".

At another place I worked, it was PERL. The CAD tools had a few
shortcomings, and on some days, if you walked by desks, everyone
was coding in PERL to make up for the productivity shortfall of
the CAD tool. The funny part, was when one of our engineers won
the award with that brand of software, for the "most complex design
of the year" using the stuff. The potential customers would think
the CAD tool had done the work, when it was something like a hundred
individual PERL scripts that managed the design (the PERL updated
signal lists on wide buses in the design -- the CAD tool expected
you to "click each one and edit it", which is idiotic).

Necessity is the mother of invention. The people I worked with,
didn't care what they had for tools. If a manager didn't "enable"
your productivity, then tough. You'd "find a way". Like one
day, I was doing something at work, with a 6MHz PC from the
warehouse (in other words, worn out computer from storage).
I didn't particularly care how fast it was, as long as the
answers kept coming out of the thing. Nobody is going to be
curious later, how you got the job done, just that the job
was finished.

   Paul