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Comment by tovej

18 hours ago

A full adder is literally one of the easier theoretical computer science concepts, and a sine approximation is a simple Maclaurin series. And yes, if you can't do a simple series expansion, you are not an engineer. You may be a developer, but not an engineer.

These are both first or second year bachelors topics. Just because you're unable to work through simple math problems doesn't mean any semi-competent computer professional would be.

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tovej

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selridge  17 hours ago

Was it a good thing for anyone writing software which included those things to need to not only work out how they are on a blackboard but how they are on the real machine in question? And how they are on the next machine over?

Do you yearn to return to that world? I suspect most people don't. It's not just knowing your own machine, but any machine the code could run on. It's also not just reaching for some 2nd year bachelor topics when the matter at hand is much more complicated. Where does your sine approximation fail? How do you know? Can you prove that? Does the compiler or the hardware decide to do things behind your back which vitiate any of those claims?

Knowing the answer to that all every time you need a sine is not something 99.99% of engineers need to worry about. IT USED TO BE. But now it's not. No one is going back to that.

  • tovej  14 hours ago

    I don't know what world you live in, but I still definitely need to know the approximation error of the methods I use.

    sin(x) has one of the simplest Maclaurin series:

    sin(x) = x - x^3/3! + x^5/5! - x^7/7! ...

    For any partial sum of that series, the error is always strictly less than the absolute value of the next term in the series. The fact that this was your example of a "difficult" engineering problem is uh, embarrassing.

    For good measure, I would of course fuzz any component involving numerical methods to ensure it stays within bounds. _As any competent engineer would_.

    And I absolutely work things out on pen and paper or a white board before implementing them. How else would I verify designs? I'm sure you're aware that fixing bugs is cheapest in the design phase.

    Are you living in an alternate reality where software quality does not matter? I'm still living in the world where engineers need to know what the fuck they're doing.