I believe ktRolster may be refering to "Procedural Abstration". The term is used in SICP [1] (the Wizard Book using scheme, previously freshman programming text at MIT).
Abstration can take many forms. But can often be described as "seperating things that change and/or repeat from those that don't", or something like that.
The last paragraph may be a joke, or based on one of the Principles in the O'Reilly Design Patterns [2] book.
You might be complaining about students being taught Python and it becoming their "blub" language. We all start somewhere, and you can indeed go far with Python in some fields. It's popular with scientists for instance.
True. But before the days of Structured Programming widespread understanding of algorithms was hoped to lead to a professional Software Engineering field.
The idea of "Software Engineering" was born with the Software Crisis report in the 1960's.
Later on practicing SE's would study things like Design Patterns so things evolved over time.
EDIT: Software Engineers probably should know some relevant basics, but programmers could never come up with a "body of knowledge" like real engineers have.
It all depends what you work on and what new developments keep coming out...
Wait a moment, they have a Falsehoods series on all sorts of subjects. The Fake News fact checkers are going to try globbing on to every niche they can...
A real man might take responsibility, but if that ever becomes too visible you will be made the dunce if not scapegoat. Maybe only the successful people had the clout to pull it off. :/
Admitting mistakes to move on, failing fast, should prevent prolonging arguements though (if you can pull it off).
Table lookup is a common solution when a FPU isn't available and speed is a higher priority than accuracy.
I've actually used formulas for trig functions before with IEEE double floating-point until the accuracy didn't improve.
(think it was a continued fraction or or some other technique I didn't understand, didn't -lm or something for builtin functions and worked around it lol...)
It was very slow! Makes your computer's fan spin faster, even changes the smell in the room while grinding away!
Are you sure there weren't some sort of recruitment effort with at least some of those guys... Though you do see some tech pages out there, maybe because of Hangouts? shrug
I didn't know Tim O'Reilly was on G+ but ALL these recent posts are pop-politics and ugly at that! I thought you were referring to all Google services being tied in.
You are describing "generalization". Lookup Tables (LUT) can still be a valid technique if the problem space is small enough.
If you use a table for trigonometry functions then interpolation is generally used... So it doesn't have to be all-or-nothing.
Compression generally works by removing redundancy via some means or another according to some scheme... But compressed data can take up more space if it goes against the grain (i.e. RLE when the repeated byte is the same as escape byte). Randon number generators with simple seeds (not a hidden entropy pool) can be thought of as disrupting simple patterns in a sequence.
Yeah. But for a function with parameters there needs to be a way to associate values with parameters. There are different ways to do that, but even a static global would be accessed by address.