Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!purdue!mentor.cc.purdue.edu!l.cc.purdue.edu!cik
From: cik@l.cc.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: It looks like he's at it again!
Summary: Science or stupid technology
Message-ID: <2392@l.cc.purdue.edu>
Date: 23 Jul 90 14:03:52 GMT
References: <1990Jul21.004616.649@Stardent.COM> <388@e2big.mko.dec.com> <RQU4JU7@ficc.ferranti.com>
Organization: Purdue University Statistics Department
Lines: 54

In article <RQU4JU7@ficc.ferranti.com>, peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) writes:
> In article <388@e2big.mko.dec.com> gillett@ceomax.dec.com (Christopher Gillett) writes:
< > Whoa!  Slow down...pop a couple valium. I didn't see Karsh's comments 
< > as indicative of *all* computer science types.  His remarks were
< > about the typical computer scientist, not all of them.
> 
> That's no less offensive. His remarks were about a certain stereotype of the
> computer scientist. About the stereotypical ivory tower type, not the typical
> average case.

This stereotype fits the great majority of so-called applied scientists, and
I am including applied numerical analysts and applied statisticians in the lot.

A good applied scientist would not exclude a tool on the grounds that it 
could be misused.  A good applied scientist does not try to use "standard"
methods when there are better ways.  A good applied scientist allows the
introduction of new methods, and even invents them if he can think of them
and they are appropriate.

Also, the good engineer asks the good applied scientist for advice and help.

< > Borland Industries makes a vast
< > majority of their money trading on the performance of their tools.
> 
> And people trying to maintain portable programs curse them everyday. It's 
> one thing to write a hot pascal compiler. It's one thing to define a superset
> of pascal. But writing a hot compiler that breaks the rules for well behaved
> programs (try running any Borland program under double-dos: there's NO reason
> a compiler should ever write straight to the screen memory!), and defines a
> language that's doesn't even include standard Pascal as a subset...
> 
> Yeh, lots of people bought Borland tools. Just like lots of people bought the
> IBM-PC. In both cases it burned lots of people interested in portable programs
> for no good reason... it's one thing to write a non-portable program, but
> making it impossible to write portable ones is a whole other ball game.
> 
< > Aha!  Lets presume for a moment that you are truly a computer scientist,
< > and that you buy into all the stuff that computer "science" teaches.
> 
> Which computer "science"? The real one, or the straw man Bruce Karsh and
> you keep bringing up.

Too many of them are the type Bruce Karsh brings up.  Those who say that 
one must not use gotos, or that one should contort the problem to fit in
the context of Fortran or Pascal or C, those who want RISC so that the
compiler can optimize the code, those who would replace insertions with
subroutine calls, etc.  Probably most of those so-called scientists would
have a difficult time optimizing the code, so they want the machine to do
it for a restricted set of code.  These people are legion.  The others are
scarce.
-- 
Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette IN47907
Phone: (317)494-6054
hrubin@l.cc.purdue.edu (Internet, bitnet)	{purdue,pur-ee}!l.cc!cik(UUCP)