And just fwiw, while I'm sorry to hear about your experience. I totally agree with the original article.
I found out about SIN/COS a while before I really understood what they were. :) I treated them as magic keywords and used to just plug in weird functions to see what turned out (sin(x)+cos(x), sin(cos(x)) etc).
Sometimes we take things like portability and platform-independence so far that we end up complicating things. As an example, with Turbo Pascal and DOS, I could just treat the video buffer as an array and write to it. Under Linux (even in the old days), I wasn't able to figure out how to access the console display as a array. The "right way" was to wrestle with Curses. I declined the invitation and stuck to network/command line programs. :)
I found out about SIN/COS a while before I really understood what they were. :) I treated them as magic keywords and used to just plug in weird functions to see what turned out (sin(x)+cos(x), sin(cos(x)) etc).
Sometimes we take things like portability and platform-independence so far that we end up complicating things. As an example, with Turbo Pascal and DOS, I could just treat the video buffer as an array and write to it. Under Linux (even in the old days), I wasn't able to figure out how to access the console display as a array. The "right way" was to wrestle with Curses. I declined the invitation and stuck to network/command line programs. :)