/sci/ - Science & Math

Specifically, in this link, skip to the paragraph starting with, "Caper Jones, in an unpublished 1977 study for IBM, found...".
http://www.ganssle.com/rants/powerprogrammers.htm

I don't know how much CFD you like. I don't do engineering work like you, but I like raytracing, and I recall an article someone wrote that contrasted the difficulty of working with efficient real-valued but common-sense raytracing algorithms with the ease of working with initially unintuitive but practically more elegant geometric algebra (hypercomplex arithmetic) less efficient algorithms. I'm thinking of the difference between CFD from "first principal" vs CFD via lattice-boltzman. I know the latter is a lot easier for me to grasp, even though it emerges from unintuitive foundations - BUT I program with Scheme, and I don't have the pressures of real engineering work. I figure if back in college I'd had different most-basic tools like I do now that I'd have had a much easier time of things. So, the chart I badly drew feels like the more experienced engineers' role becomes "build superior fundamental tools for the interior engineers so they can more easily build themselves up into better engineers/so they can build the fundamental tools themselves". Ah, and pic related, I forgot the drawing in the earlier post. I swear there is a drawing like this on Ganssle's site.