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A comment on Why There Will Never be Another Da Vinci. Parent comment

Re:Why There Will Never be Another Da Vinci by bestes on Saturday July 16, 2011 @04:02AM (#2770381)
I felt like every subject I took in school was like this. We started at the beginning of time, then worked through all the important people and discoveries, etc. But, never, did we reach the state-of-the-art. That was very discouraging.

When learning On my own, I simply start with today, the fill in history as necessary. I don't know FORTRAN or COBOL, for example. There are other examples where this is costing me, but I can't give those examples.

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Re:Why There Will Never be Another Da Vinci by static_cast on Saturday July 16, 2011 @06:13AM (#2770500)
I think it is a little bit different:

Fortran and COBOL are implementations of imperative programming languages. The ideas did not change. You still use while, for, if constructs in your ruby/python/java code.

only another level of abstractions was added now with object principles, you can create your own types, you can use polymorphism

but without an idea of imperative programming you would not be able to use these "new" languages (functional programming left aside)

I think it is the same with science, at least regarding physics - einstein did not proove newton wrong. he just extended his theory so that it would better describe the reality (in this case: what happens when you approach speed of light) but for most calculations newton's formulas are still fine.

I was turned off when I started college why I had to learn so much cs theory, but once you start to understanding the concepts and ideas behind certain things you are (theoretical) able to dissect the latest hype look and understand why things are the way they are.

tl;dr: learn concepts and ideas not specific implementations

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Re:Why There Will Never be Another Da Vinci by btrask on Saturday July 16, 2011 @07:33AM (#2770579)
Perhaps if more programmers took some time to learn the history of the field before jumping in and trying to leave their mark, we'd have more progress and less reinventing of the wheel.

"In computer science, we stand on each others' feet." -- Brian Reid

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