high vs low level programming

[Alan Dayley]

Professionally, I started as a low level guy flipping bits and programming
protocols.  I have also worked for 4-5 years in the application world doing
UI and database front ends.  A little less than a year ago I changed jobs
back to the hardware/low-level world.  It was a GREAT change!  I had
fogotten how much I loved to "make the lights blink" doing embedded and
driver stuff!

The transistion "up" to applications and DB stuff was not that hard, as far
as being able to make something that got the job done.  I know that much of
my code during those years was far short of elegant or in keeping with good
programming standards for that type of evironment.  My degree is EE so I do
not have formal training in the high-level programming.  I can see that
such training would be usefull, at least for me, were I to continue in that
path.

But I am not.  I am back in the low-level where I want to be!

Another thought on the subject: high-level programming opportunities are
more prevelent than low-level.  This is simply because almost any company
in any industry can use application and DB development.  Low-level
programming is more specialized and there are fewer companies that need
that sort of skill.  It only takes one or two low-level programmers to
develop the libraries or drivers that can keep armies of high-level
programmers busy using the low-level objects.

Alan

At 02:19 AM 3/7/01 -0500, you wrote:
>I decided to look through the archives for this list and seems
>that discussion is sporadic.  So I'll kick up a topic of discussion
>that's not directly Linux related, but has much to do with
>SW development.  How many people here are low level hackers
>(c, asm, bit fiddling in hardware, etc) and how many are more
>into high level (C++, perl, DB, xml, SOAP, etc)?  I'm mainly
>a low level hacker who can write perl and php scripts to 
>put up little web sites but a lot of high level concepts such
>as design patterns, complex OO, things .net, CORBA, etc really
>confuse the hell out of me at times.  What's other people experiences
>with different levels of software development? What about those that
>have started with one and gone the other way? I believe and have
>seen first hand that it's a lot easier to go from  being a low
>lever coder to a high level one than vice versa.  What I've noted
>is that a lot of high level programmers haven't had the exposure
>to hardware concepts and that makes it really hard to grasp 
>how the code actually maps to hardware bits. 
>
>Comments, flames?
>
>g'night,
>~Deepak

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|Alan Dayley             www.adtron.com
|Software Engineer       602-735-0300 x331
|ADayley@adtron.com
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