Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "Brian Kernighan Qu0026A 2/3 - Computerphile" video.

  1. 7:30 Back when reading and writing were first invented, no doubt there were similar discussions about the usefulness of that. Initially it was a specialist field in its own right (you learned to be qualified as a “scribe”). Then it became a universal skill. That was the first “information technology” -- it gave us the ability to keep track of large amounts of information, beyond the quantities we could keep in our heads. Computing is the second “information technology” -- it gives us the ability to process large amounts of information, beyond the capabilities built into our heads.
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  2. 5:15 “No” is the correct answer. Actually the idea of “graphical” programming goes back decades -- an early example was ProGraph on the Macintosh, back in the 1990s, and they have never really been able to make progress beyond that. Besides the objection that bwk points out, another major problem is that you can’t do version control on graphical program blocks. How do you diff two branches, and how do you merge them? We can do that with text code. Look at the massive popularity of Git nowadays, and the major difference that has made to our productivity. Nobody wants to abandon that.
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  3. Has anybody asked him what version-control system(s) he uses, if any?
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  4. 3:34 Ha! He used “procedural” as a synonym for “imperative”, not (as is the fashion among some hipsters) as an antonym for “object-oriented”. Object-orientation tends to be mostly procedural, after all.
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