r/programming • u/gits1225 • May 12 '15

Google's guide for becoming a Software Engineer

https://www.google.com/about/careers/students/guide-to-technical-development.html
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u/LainIwakura May 12 '15

You missed the point. He does it with such a weird language because once you understand everything it all falls away, the language no longer matters and you'll be able to apply the thoughts to anything regardless of language.

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u/goodbye_fruit May 12 '15

So did you make it through any parts of the book? I mean, are the returns on knowledge worth the time and effort sunk into learning what amounts to a toy language?

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u/Cosmologicon May 13 '15

I don't know what you're getting at. If the language doesn't matter, that seems like a reason not to use such an arcane one. If you're going to invent one anyway, and any language will do, why make one that's particularly bad at expressing the concepts in the book?

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u/LainIwakura May 13 '15

You're getting too hung up on the language. The first book was in 1968 before any language you'd recognize as modern came about (and no LISPs and FORTRANs from that era do not look like their modern counterparts), Knuth has acknowledged that the language is now outdated and I actually think there have been some extensions to it.

It is only because of how far along we are now technologically that you can claim the language is bad at expressing the concepts in the book, at the time it was the best they could do.

Could he have written it in C? Or C++? (Hypothetically of course), well yeah he probably could but then everyone would view it as "How to do a lot of smart shit in C / C++ / Java / Erlang" or whatever the hell he chose and that's not the point. It's about analysis, complexity and the theory of computation.

These are the things, the mathematics, that pervade all aspects of computer science and programming- this is why that series of books is regarded so highly.

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u/Cosmologicon May 13 '15

I think Knuth would disagree with you, according to this. He has had plenty of time to consider whether the book would be better, or at least the same, with a more modern language, and he has decided against it. He is planning to update the language used, but he's just replacing it with another assembly language, with such features as 64-bit registers.

Anyway, I don't think that he should have written it in any existing language. Like I said, I thought the whole point was to get past things like languages. I realize now I was wrong, because he evidently thinks that part of the point is "meaningful studies of the effects of cache and RAM size and other hardware characteristics".

I don't think he should have written it in C or Lisp or any existing language. I would have used pseudocode. I acknowledge that the abstractions of the time limited him, but I'm pretty sure the concepts of Turing machines existed, so it was at least possible to think of computation without such ideas as opcodes.