Linked by Takuya Murata on Tue 18th May 2004 06:26 UTC
My physics teacher likes to say that physics like to make problems they face look like ones that they know how to solve. A simple harmonic oscillation was one he frequently used in class, as is presumably the case in physics in general.
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The article tried hard, but it cratered.
And just for the record, a recursive function is really, really bad, especially on an unbounded list (unbounded = who the heck knows how big it is at runtime). That's a good way to whack your stack and core dump/crash.
It's this kind of thing that's the problem with the article: there's no depth on the other side. Don't use goto? Well there are perfectly good reasons to use it...but if you've never encountered them then in your worldview goto is bad. OOP? It's good for some things, not for others. And in any case it's useful just to organize all that C code (wrap it). More importantly, it helps in standardizing interfaces and access to your data structures, something important in multi-programmer environments. A big buffer for text? How naive. What happens when you try and open that 85gb file? Barf.
The problem with computing is that everything is still relatively new, and it's still too macho. Visual Basic has its faults, but it's not much more than a bunch of components strung together - the holy grail of computing. It's also denigrated by most 'real' programmers. A good VB guy can write something that performs to spec in a day, and a C/C++ guy would take weeks and it still wouldn't match the requirements. It'd be faster and smaller, though. What can you do?
As for the other stuff, well, if you don't understand the problem space, then that's your issue. Prolog, amazingly enough, has real-world uses that would fry your mind if you tried to do it using normal procedural languages. Whatever.
The main problem with programming is the people that write the software, not the box, the architecture we use, the endian-ness, etc. It's starting to change now that everything is high-speed, but it'll be another few years before everyone goes high-level (high-level meaning scripting/VB style).