high vs low level programming

[Gorman, John]

I am what you call a low-level hacker. Actually I started out with
about 15 years coding COBOL on a mainframe, then for the past 6 years
I have been coding in C on a unix environment.

I definitely like learning and knowing how things work from the inside out.
When I first started using unix, in order to teach myself how things worked
I wrote my own version of a lot of the system utilities (df, du, ls, ...)
and then ported them to each platform I had the opportunity top work on.
It was a great learning experience.

While I definitely consider myself a C/Unix person, I feel that the 
future is in the internet, so I have been spending a lot of time writing 
web applications at home and work (PHP, JavaScript,...)

I have tried several times to get into Java, but for some reason I
never stick with it. We are started to use it here, and are running into
performance and garbage collection problems.

I agree with you that people who have a good understanding of the low
level languages are able to grasp the high level languages and understand
the impact to doing certain things.

John Gorman



-----Original Message-----
From: Deepak Saxena [mailto:deepak@csociety.purdue.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, March 07, 2001 12:20 AM
To: plug-devel@lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us
Subject: high vs low level programming



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

-- 
Deepak Saxena - deepak@csociety.purdue.edu - phone://602.790.0500

Code Monkey, MontaVista Software, Inc. - THE Embedded Linux Experts

call me 'evil' call me 'tide is on your side' anything that you want
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