Interesting Links for 22-10-2014
- Poor kids who do everything right don’t do much better than rich kids who do everything wrong
(tags: inequality wealth society ) - The Internet: A Glossary
(tags: funny internet ciph ) - A journalist investigates Gamergate to find the true basis for it. Can you guess what they find?
(tags: games society sexism feminism ) - Mexican drug cartels are worse ( Read more... )
OMG yes, the Pascal labs! Barely one step up from learning BBC Basic and about as useful in science or computing. I managed to skive doing so many physics labs in my 2nd/3rd year by doing computing and digital electronics. Skiving labs and sweet-talking demonstrators into helping us set up were the main skills I learned in practicals.
Fortran is good at what it does well (running scientific algorithms very quickly). But it also (especially Fortran 77) encouraged some *amazingly* bad coding habits (mainly, but not exclusively in the area of GOTOs and spaghetti code). After a few years of having to understand and bugfix fix Fortran 77 code written by scientists who had never taken a computer science course, I remember grumpily retorting that there should be a prerequisite course to doing any Fortran development where you'd only pass it if you wrote a compelling essay entitled "Why Fortran 77 sucks".
Did they still have the nuclear/particle lab sessions on the Apple IIs when you were there? They were ancient machines, but they kept them on because the then-modern computers had awful issues. They'd got a load of new machines and then realised the monitors weren't very well shielded and had to be switched off when you did the experiments *headdesk*.
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