On: No One Programs Any More

[hs]

i remember my graduate level class on simulation (engineering course, not math/cs)

we had first assignment on generating 10000 random numbers

a guy fired up excel, generated rand in one cell, dragged to the bottom 10000, and gasp printed it

It was fun looking at flickering monitor, and humming laser printer - after a while, i felt sympathy for those devices

it took me less than 5 loc in matlab ... and being friendlier to trees as a bonus :D

and no, it's not a community college ... rather a top research engineering school ... but hey, things like this happen a lot

[etal → hs]

Hey, it's still faster than a handful of dice and a blank notebook. Sometimes the point of a course's first assignment is to show students how wrong their preconceptions are.