On 05/08/2015 05:54 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Wed, 05 Aug 2015 10:07:28 +0100, Stephen wrote:
>> I rail against the "dumbing down" I see happening.
>
> It is't "dumbing down" - it's designing so it isn't rocket science.
>
> A fine distinction, but an important one. :)

Way back when, if you wanted to write computer programs, you practically 
needed a PhD in electrical engineering, propositional logic, Boolean 
algebra and what-not.

Then home computers with BASIC came along, and suddenly any idiot could type

   PRINT 4.5 + 7.9

without having to know or care that the ASCII character codes for "4", 
"." and "5" have to be converted from decimal to binary - and better 
yet, into floating-point representation. And that to perform the 
addition, you have to denormalise one operand so that they both have the 
same exponent, and then add the mantissas, and then renormalise the 
result. (And that addition almost certainly required more than one ADC 
op-code, because the mantissa was definitely wider than 8 bits.) And 
then transform that back to decimal, with some suitable number of places 
of significance based on the actual width of the mantissa. And then 
transform THAT back into ASCII codes. And then compute the correct 
address in the framebuffer to write those code to make the VIC II 
display the text on the screen.

No, you just type the damn thing, and it works.

Suddenly you didn't need to be a super-nerd to write computer programs. 
(And you didn't have to memorise ASCII tables or VIC II register addresses.)

It's a bit like the way you can drive a way without having a clue how an 
internal combustion engine actually works.

Is that "dumbing down"? Or is that "removing unimportant implementation 
details"? Where do you draw the line?

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