guilty until proven insolent

[worksofcraft]

I trained as an electronics engineer and my perspective on programming is totally different to that of a mathematician, or that of a linguist, or countless other professions who use computers to tackle their problems on a daily basis.

You see to me, things like calculating bit error rates on optical communication channels and generating wide band pseudo random digital noise with a shift register are not far fetched applications, but I do understand that to others they are completely unreal.

I notice we had a few altercations on perspectives and suddenly I also notice that some people who were active daily on this forum are not taking part. I feel guilty... should I feel guilt? IDK!

This isn't about one-upman-ship it is about simply respecting each other and that we all have different points of view and different objectives. So I don't see why we can't just all carry on contributing to the discussions where we feel we do have constructive input to contribute... do you?

[CptPicard]

to that of a mathematician, or that of a linguist, or countless other professions who use computers to tackle their problems on a daily basis.

How about a guy with a computer science education who programs professionally and enjoys considering issues in computation on his free time? Seems to be missing from the list :)

That is, I use computers on a daily basis to tackle other people's problems and am expected to be able to do it...



You see to me, things like calculating bit error rates on optical communication channels and generating wide band pseudo random digital noise with a shift register are not far fetched applications, but I do understand that to others they are completely unreal.

No, they are not "unreal" applications. I think you underestimate us. The whole point I was trying to make that it is interesting to me that (some) guys from engineering really do tend to believe that what they do is "incomprehensible" to others, and that the hardware view of things is the deep, fundamental view of computation.

This is not yet a statement about the correctness of that belief; just an observation that "bits" and "pointers" seem to feature in that world-view a lot.

Personally I consider those things to be a subset of it all, and that computation and computability itself is a rather abstract idea in general. For example I did enough bit error rate stuff in my Master's thesis on sensor network data transfer capacity, all without a computer at all... When it comes to programming -- definition of and expression by computable symbolic systems -- it has its foundations in mathematical logic, and linguistics can provide interesting insights. It is understanding problems in such a way that you can solve it by together concepts that are computable and result in a computable, correct combination that I find to be the most important aspect.

But, that is the "theoretical computer scientist's" perspective. It seems to be, for a lot of people, a bit unreal.



I notice we had a few altercations on perspectives and suddenly I also notice that some people who were active daily on this forum are not taking part.

People have lives, and generally don't bother grinding something that isn't going anywhere, that's all.

[nvteighen]

I trained as an electronics engineer and my perspective on programming is totally different to that of a mathematician, or that of a linguist, or countless other professions who use computers to tackle their problems on a daily basis.

You see to me, things like calculating bit error rates on optical communication channels and generating wide band pseudo random digital noise with a shift register are not far fetched applications, but I do understand that to others they are completely unreal.

I notice we had a few altercations on perspectives and suddenly I also notice that some people who were active daily on this forum are not taking part. I feel guilty... should I feel guilt? IDK!

This isn't about one-upman-ship it is about simply respecting each other and that we all have different points of view and different objectives. So I don't see why we can't just all carry on contributing to the discussions where we feel we do have constructive input to contribute... do you?

Eh? Where comes this from???

Believe it or not, people here stick to what they know much more than what you think. In this forum there are very qualified people, some are even pros (like you).

I think you are overreacting a bit. Ok, people disagreed with your ideas and gave good reasons to disagree. The point is that some of your threads have extended far beyond the scope of the topic and made some people wonder if you were understanding what you were told. That's my honest impression of what happened.

By the way: I'm not a linguist yet; wait until June... I hope to have graduated for then if I don't do anything silly and fail a course...

[worksofcraft]

Yeah, that's a relief :)
My ex always said I was oversensitive :shock: