Microcontroller programming (Arduino, Microchip PIC, etc)

Sparks wrote: »

And meanwhile, all the code that actually runs our society (banks, hospitals, public and emergency services, city management software, embedded software, just-in-time delivery systems for food and goods, etc, etc) is all in COBOL, C, C++ and FORTRAN. Maybe with a little Java in the newer bits.

I'm all for new languages - I'm particularly fond of Python personally, but I can grok the value in LispScala and those with more unusual conceptual models - but we're not turning out enough people today that can fix the bits our society requires to keep functioning. And the people who do fix those bits today are dying out and their skillset is being lost. And the depth of those skillsets are quite dependant on knowing the hardware.

And that's only looking at the "computer" stuff and not the "appliance" stuff. Embedded controllers are the lion's share of all deployed computer hardware and computer code in the world today, and that's not going to change anytime soon. It's almost all exclusively written in assembly and C, it's only just recently started to happen in bus widths above 16 bits, it's all seriously hard-limited in cpu horsepower, memory, and every other resource you can think of, and a lot of the time, someone dies if a bug isn't caught before production.

Excellent points.


Legacy is the forgotten part of the iceberg.


So should programmers be trained to maintain the vast quantities of old crufty code, or to build better code in future, using the modern tools? What if its not possible to do both, without compromise?

Maybe you should have to pick a stream: 'Get paid well to maintain the old stuff' vs 'work in new sexy language X'.

I sometimes think this is almost happening already, as you've a lot of Math and Physics courses producing de facto Computer Scientists, and CS courses producing maintenance engineers.




Tools get better, and the amount an individual programmer can accomplish grows; I sometimes wonder if there'll be a programming crash some day, where the 90% case for 90% of the problems are solved.

But there's so many systems to maintain, and an ever increasing range of tasks people want software to solve.

Sparks wrote: »

And none of the graduates I've seen in the last few years from our undergrad courses know enough to work in the area at all, and apparently, that's endemic.

I have to say, that's my impression of recent graduates too.
I'm kind of surprised that it is.

Logically, I should wonder if I'm just suffering from an outdated perspective on software dev (and I'm still in my 20s).

But I kind of thought the generations after me, growing up even more deeply immersed in information culture, would all be all round ninjas; and they don't seem to be.

Sparks wrote: »

We're going to see a serious manpower crisis in our industry in the next decade, one that will make the current crisis look blissful by comparison.

We're certainly going to see that in Ireland - and are already - but do you reckon that'll hold through internationally?
There's a lot of smart people coming out of the chinese university system, lot of bulk coding ability coming from india - you think the need for maintenance will eclipse that?

Daegerty wrote: »

can you suggest a decent cheap AVR programmer that works well with linux by any chance?

USB or serial?

AVR ISP is pretty good for a cheap serial one, there's probably lots of cloned ones out there.
AVR jtag ice mark II is good for USB, lots of these cloned too.

Both will work with AVR studio in windows and Linux

I got into playing with arduinos a while ago and now use them a lot for developing prototypes. I come from a coding background so they were great in that they let me play with low level electronics and slowly build on the basic foundation. Now I'm able to work on large scale projects with complex interface electronics and moving onto more advanced controllers and languages..

All this because I saw a youtube arduino project and thought - that looks cool, I must get one and have a play with it..

tkelleyireland wrote: »

Anyone have experience with the .net Gadgeteer GHI Catalogues. I was listening to one of the .netrocks podcasts with Andrew Duthie who did a kinect controlled copter diy job. just the sort of things the kids might be into

Probably best to start a new thread for this rather than resurrecting an old zombie.