Aussie Woodwork Forum Decides Which Handplanes are the Best!

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Originally Posted by bitingmidge

Even at the front end, the "craft" has disappeared from the drafting process and with it the thought process that was once used to communicate, which after all is what a drawing is supposed to do!

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This is so true. My last job before I retired was with a shed manufacturer and the Manager who took over from me was a draughtsman by trade and learnt his trade on the drawing board before Cad programs. He is a true craftsman and pedantic with his drawings which he carried over into Cad.

The other draughtsmen that were there learnt their trade mainly on computer although at tafe they do do some board work they are basically computer people.

The manager drafty was constantly frustrated with some of the poor drawings produced by these other draftys.

I don't believe their is any subtitution for learning any trade from a practical standpoint other than using the hand tools of that trade. Book learning just doesn't cut it.

Even in the wonderful world of computer programming, which has been around on a large scale now for at least 30 years, technology has replaced skills that were once held in high esteem and replaced them with computer-corrected sloppiness.

My very first bit of programming was done on a sheet of paper on which you encoded the machine instructions. This sheet (or sheets) of paper was then given to a data entry operator who would key them in on the one and only terminal screen and your program would then be compiled and executed. If it failed, you had to fix the problem on paper and go through the process again. This was time consuming and frustrating for all involved but you became pretty proficient at 'desk checking' your code.

Now, you have automatic syntax checkers, step through debugging, code optimisers. This allows any idiot to write reasonably good functional code. Take the sytax checker away and they would be stuffed. This leads to an attitude of sloppiness because you rely on the machine to fix your stuff-ups for you. It means that the output from a commercial point of view is better and cheaper. What it breeds though is a generation of programmers who haven't got a clue how or why their code works, it just does.

Take them outside the square and they are stuffed.

Your right Silent. We had get a programmer write us a program to extract jpegs from avi files, attach GPS info and name and place them in a file structure. We were talking about 2-3terabytes of avi files so each line of code had to be repeated millions of times. The slightest bit of redunant code added an enourmous amount of processing time.

Two younger programmers were able to get some code to work but it took ages until we got a more 'experienced' guy to cut the lines of code down by about 50% which reduced processing time accordingly.

I guess the younger guys relied heavily on autocoding features....or were just crap. And yes, thats a LOT of jpegs.