Sure. Nor do musk’s “credentials” of having done some BASIC programming when he was 12, or whatever, support the idea that he can look at a couple lines of Twitter code and judge whether the person who claims to have written them is any good.
No, I started with Fortran and LGP-21 machine language. Not assembler - the first assembler I used I wrote myself. Dijkstra said “It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.”
(Best issue of SIGPLAN notices ever.)
I’m not criticizing Musk’s management because of his programming background, I’m criticizing that he thinks he can evaluate programmers based on the input he requested.
I’ve been in on promotion decisions, and people get promoted for leadership skills, organization, and meeting deadlines. I’ve never known a bad programmer to even be suggested for a management role. Many good ones weren’t interested though, or would have been terrible managers.
I can certainly imagine good programmers who would make awful managers complaining that being a not so good programmer being an asset, while totally missing the real qualifications for the management role.
I don’t know the specifics but there are voting shares and non-voting shares at SpaceX (and Starlink is a program at SpaceX) and I would bet Musk owns way over 50% of the voting shares.
You must have started later in life. I started programming in Jr. High School in the 1970’s when I was 13. Trust me, BASIC was the only game in town.
And no offense to Edsger Dijkstra, but I dispute that you can’t learn to code properly if you first learn BASIC. What BASIC taught me is that BASIC sucks, and the first time I used Pascal it was a revelation. I have never had a problem with object-oriented programming, modules, pointers, memory management, whatever. It’s not like BASIC becomes your mental template for all programming or something.
It’s a good thing that’s not what he did, then. I have explained what he did several times, and offered a rationalization for it from the perspective of someone who HAS been a software manager and developer (Me). You’ve chosen to ignore it all, and the plain text of what Musk asked for, in favor of your gross mischaracterization of what went on.
Fighting ignorance this is not.
That could be, but we’re talking about his net worth. I expect the voting and non-voting shares both count towards that.
I mean, just the idea that he’s going to personally evaluate hundreds of people is absurd.
Yeah, I caught the misspelling of ‘Perl’ as well, but chalked it up to a typo. I woud think a programming site would know the name of the language.
What if it was a preliminary screening to get rid of the obvious hangers-on? What if he had inside knowledge that some of the developers sucked really bad, but he needed an ‘impartial’ process to get rid of them without a lawsuit? Or what if there are a million details we aren’t privy to that make this process less than crazy?
Was it hundreds of people? You say that confidently. I saw a group of maybe 30 people in that meeting. Do you have a cite for ‘hundreds’?
Again, the amount of ‘this is crazy’ talk coming from people who A) don’t know anything about software, and B) don’t know much of anything about what actually went on, seems like the opposite of fighting ignorance.
As I said, the session could have been a shit-show, or it could have been a smart filtering opportunity plus an opportunity for Musk to get together with core coders and take their measure. We really don’t know. I provided some rationale for why this all might have made sense and been a reasonable plan under the circumstances. I also said that it’s possible that it’s all hot garbage and Musk is flailing.
But when the guy doing it has a track record like Musk’s, my default is that he has a reason for doing it. That doesn’t extend to his tweeting - Musk looks to me like a typical genius-on-the-spectrum who may be great with technical issues but terrible with people. A poor choice to run a social network. But maybe i’m wrong.
What I could see happening, BTW, is that ‘crazy’ Musk cleans house, pisses people off by doing all the hard things that need doing at Twitter to right the ship, then announcing that he’s pulling back to work on SpaceX and Tesla and installing an acceptable head like Jack Dorsey, who will then reassure everyone including advertisers that old Twitter is back, baby. Musk isn’t sticking around as CEO forever. He’s got too much else going on.
Now, that, is a truly excellent bit of writing.
Actually the opposite is also a bit ignorant as we do not have direct evidence of what is absolutely taking place in the Twitter office.
So far what is clear is that many programmers have been laid off before that seemingly arbitrary move to id “under-performers” and then many who remained saw that and other moves by Musk and decided to vote with their feet.
Well, that explains why I did go for IT instead of programming 
, I learned how to use BASIC at community college in the 80s, CPM mainframe at college could read the Commodore 128 disks formatted in CPM mode in the commodore. I was one of the few students that could do the assignments at home instead of working at the computer lab at college.
You know, the demand may simply have been a way of screening out people with other facets to their lives. Married with children? took the severance. Member of the armed forces reserve? took the severance. Active in your faith community? took the severance. Hold a low-level, unpaid or small-stipend political office, like “district representative”? took the severance. Own a show dogs? took the severance.
On the other hand, your job is your life, and you are just so happy someone pays you to do this because it’s what you’d be doing all day (other than maybe playing World of Warcraft) anyway? signed the loyalty pledge.
Musk may not really be planning on saddling everyone with 65 hours a week, every week. He just may be trying to get rid of the people who request time off every time their kid has a school show, or it’s some obscure holiday, or there’s some local political to do. Or the Monday after their two weekends a month, and two whole weeks a year that he is not allowed to deny them, in the US at any rate.
In other words, grownups. Elon doesn’t like grownups. He’s the boy king, and he wants to be surrounded by kids.
That’s another way of putting it.
Maybe for junior high schoolers, but plenty of us were writing FORTRAN code in the 1970s, even as high schoolers. Hell, I know some people who were high schoolers writing assembly language code in the '70s.
That would be me, writing assembly on Apple ][s. Basic was, well, basic. If you wanted to do graphics or interface with hardware, it was all assembly hacking.
Nope, 1968. Though I read about BASIC I first used it when visiting my girlfriend at Dartmouth in 1976. Dartmouth of course had a time sharing system based on BASIC.
Dijkstra’s comment is that starting with BASIC gives you bad habit. My CS professor friends at the time dreaded getting freshman into CS101 classes who thought they knew all there was to know about programming by doing BASIC on their TIs or C64s.
I agree with you about Pascal. I was the Pascal teacher for my adviser’s classes - I could do the entire language in two class periods. And my dissertation was tearing about the Zurich Pascal compiler and reworking it to handle my object oriented microprogramming language.
When we taught PDP11 assembler the first project was a fairly simple Pascal program. We tore it apart to emphasize structured programming which they’d need for assembler. We scared them, but we threw away the grade.
Obviously you could learn to program well after starting with Basic - but it’s tougher.
I was teaching assembler in the '70s, and I was writing in assembler, assembled by a program I wrote myself, in 1968. My advisor, who was a student of von Neumann’s and worked in IAS when he was a PhD student at Princeton wrote his own also. Von Neumann thought it was a waste of time - just like floating point.
And there were plenty of FORTRAN and COBOL platforms out there in the 70s.
They practically all were…at least in the business world.
I remember friends of mine who left the company we were all working at to go work for Security Pacific National Bank (it no longer exists, so it’s o.k. to mention the name?). One of the guys met me for lunch and said they still had Assembly programs running in production. So, he signed up for an evening class in Assembler at UCLA and talked me into taking it with him. Not my thing. All I can remember is the light bulb going on when I found out what IEFBR14 meant. Cool.
At Y2K time we discovered a lot of COBOL programs running 30 years later. And probably now.