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| Authored by: emmenjay on Sunday, September 02 2012 @ 11:39 AM EDT |
As I said, Bill, I am attempting to write a proper reply. My comment on illness
was an explanation of why it is taking a long time.
Designing a CPU is a task for a hardware engineer, not a programmer. Now a
programmer may also have skills as a hardware engineer (and many other skills
besides) but when a person designs a CPU, they are exercising their hardware
skills.
A CPU likely contains software and whoever writes that software is clearly a
programmer, but programming skills alone will be insufficient to design a CPU.
The post to which I was replying contained the following:
Michael (me) said:
> > Many programmers are (sadly) almost innumerate.
Anonymous replied:
> I would disagree, yet still, the good
> ones -- particularly the ones designing
> CPUs and developing programming languages
> -- are extremely well-versed in
> mathematics. No modern CPU is ever built
> until its design has been modeled
> mathematically and that model tested.
This seems to present the idea that programmers design CPUs as argument against
my observation that many programmers are almost innumerate. Certainly not all,
but an alarming number. (I base that opinion on my experience, working with
hundreds of developers of various levels of skill. It is only an opinion, but
it is my opinion).
The comment about modelling is correct, but not obviously relevant.
After spending some time trying to write something in response to that comment,
I feared that said commenter did not have sufficient background knowledge to
understand any response unless it contained copious quantities of background
material -- and I lacked the energy to produce such a piece.
PoIR (and to a lesser extent some others) have raised some reasonable points and
I am now trying to address that.
The wish to prove software == maths is, I assume, so as to say therefore
software is abstract and thus cannot be patented.
While abstract definitions of algorithm and maths can be found that support that
idea, these definitions are far removed from what most real life software
engineers actually do.
Rather than writing this, I should probably be working on the full reply, but my
brain has turned to jelly for the night and I was just doing a little light
reading before bed when I got distracted. I'll stop now. :-)
Michael J Smith
a.k.a. Emmenjay.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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