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Comments - How a Government Think Tank Trained The First Generation of US Software Developers

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The US government had a hand in creating much of the early computer industry.

Anything that is an advanced form like polymorphism can be expressed in more primitive forms. That is why machine code is really primitive — control is done by primitive tests with branch (close by) or jump (further away — although the two forms are probably over-complication). Data must be manually moved around from store to register, etc. Being able to say ‘3 + 4’ is much easier and more sophisticated. This is abstraction — it makes the programmer’s job easier. Polymorphism provides an abstraction over dispatch. Whenever there is a code selector, such as if or case (switch in more…

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