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Re: power sources

From: Doug Sutherland <>
Date: Sun, 4 Mar 2001 12:46:06 -0800

Chris Kalos wrote:

> I can see it now...  Doug's jacket, powered by Java -- in more
> ways than one!

Speaking of Java ... and thinking about James' requirement to do serial 
communications in assembly ... I'm not envious. When I went to college 
for programming many moons ago they made us do assembly, IBM 370 assembly 
on punch cards. This was done to weed out those who couldn't hack it. 
This assembly course eliminated 2/3 of all of people! 

Needless to say, things have changed a bit since then. I don't have any 
desire to do assembly (except on vintage hardware), although I'm not 
afraid of it, it's just too damn tedious. I now think even C is too 
tedious! I am doing a whole ton of low level device interfacing to all  
kinds of devices, but my complete toolkit is Blackdown Java on Linux, 
Java Communications API, and BASIC on microcontrollers.  I have yet to 
find a need for C or assembly. I hate allocating  memory, and I love 
objects. The combination of Java on Linux plus BASIC on microcontrollers 
is very powerful and is super easy to program. My code is very clean, 
mostly self-documenting. Someone else could probably even understand
it! And I don't allocate memory, therefore there are no memory leaks. 
Also, the code is very robust, designed such that if there is problems
with a device, the program keeps chugging along and tries again later.

I find it quite interesting that James needs to do PIC assembly for 
securing a degree in physics! I can understand this requirement for 
the compsci folks, but this seems a bit extreme for other sciences. 
I also think that most academic programs are a bit antiquated as far 
as technology goes. I wonder if the people designing these programs 
have any idea what the real job requirements are.

  -- Doug

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