Life programmers


    The sketch show "Unreal story"

    From our very first cry at birth to the last breath at the end of our lives, we are programmed. Parents, friends, teachers and even doctors. We are surrounded by rules and laws, algorithms and various manuals. I want to highlight one comment on my latest post from Zoomerman :
    A programmer is a person who creates programs.
    The programmer builds a chain of events, using the available set of resources.
    Programs are computer, musical, behavioral, educational, etc.
    The program begins to be created at the moment when the person determines the start and end points of the process.
    And if the manager says “I have a product, I want to exchange it for money” - he turns into a programmer and builds an algorithm for this process.
    For me, a programmer is not a caste or a profession. A programmer is a state of mind.

    When I received higher technical education, in the first and second year we had a practical training. And for a whole semester we made a hammer. Yes, an ordinary hammer. Unusual was the method of its manufacture. More precisely, the method is normal, but not for the person who came to receive higher education. We were forced to make it a file, an 8-sided hammer with a rusty file. Who and where wrote such a training program? What did the person who wrote this cocoa want to program in us with this work? Apparently hard work.

    In my fourth year, I waited for a new subject with the impressive name of CALS technology. Continuous informational support of deliveries and the product life cycle - this name was a balm for the brain, after files and propaganda of the Soviet heritage in the field of machine tools. And you know what happened? I did not understand anything from the fact that the young teacher was reading to us from printouts. He did not teach us, but read to us. It was terribly boring. All students were bored. We sat like Bart Simpson on a Sunday sermon and dangled our feet.

    In general, we have programmers for training programs at the Ministry of Education are very far from reality. My parents are teachers. By the way, they used to be called a “teacher of work”, now a “teacher of technology”. Apparently the use of the buzzword somehow had to change the attitude towards teachers. Jokes about the fact that when a physical teacher and a teacher of work stop drinking, the school becomes a gymnasium, gradually becoming irrelevant. This I judge by my father. But questions on school curricula are becoming very topical. That material base, which is laid down in the modern program for the lessons of Technology, is completely absent in the workshops. There is nothing. Jigsaws, files, hammers - all the legacy of the USSR. Still wondering why there are not enough workers in the workplace? And where did so many managers and, no offense, programmers come from?

    All of you know how a modern elevator works in your home. The motion algorithm is simple and straightforward. Have you ever wondered what is missing in the elevator management program? What algorithm did the programmers forget to add to the code? Take the elevator during rush hour.

    Forgotten algorithm
    Each elevator has a weight / overload sensor. Going down from the upper floors, the crowded elevator stops to pick up people on the way down. It takes a lot of time for a useless stop. It is enough to add an algorithm to the code that will instruct the elevator to go down without stops at a certain load. Add only three lines of code to the firmware of modern elevators. Increase usability, as do bus drivers who skip stops if his car looks like a can of sprat.

    PS
    After a recent explosion in a metro in St. Petersburg, the driver was presented for the award, who, according to the instructions, brought the train to the nearest station and thereby saved the lives of people. This is a very worthy deed. No less worthy and worthy of attention is the person or group of people who developed this very instruction. These are real life programmers who wrote great code in the form of a guide that helped people return home that day to their family and friends. Write the right programs, and maybe your code will one day save someone’s life or make people's lives more comfortable.

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