20160304

Tower of Babel




And the LORD said, "Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them."

Long ago when I worked as an engineer for the BBC there was a man in the Research Dept, let's call him Mr Black, who was venerated as an oracle, because he understood the vagaries of radio propagation across mixed terrain, antenna theory, and the like. Black magic stuff.  He might, for all I know, have been the world's best expert on the subject.

Few folk like him exist today. There is no need. We simply go to the god Google to get our answers.

Not too many years back Farnell issued a paper catalog every year and this was my Bible when designing a new electronic circuit. The same information was available on the internet but I found the book quicker. Now we have faster broadband and the search engines have improved so it is (usually) quicker to use the internet.  I note that Farnell have stopped issuing the catalog.

I have recently been working on a software project using Visual C#, a language I had never used before. They didn't teach me C# at college, I haven't read any books, and yet it is a very verbose and often convoluted and not at all intuitive language. At every turn I was typing "C# this" or "C# that" into the search bar and discovering almost instantly advice from many other programmers worldwide. Who needs a tame Mr. Black when you can consult a whole world of knowledge?

And what will now be impossible for them?

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