Why is electronics so complicated?

Compared to software, electronics is elegant, simple, obvious and easy to learn.

"Why undergo a process that could take far less time if better presented in terms of uniformity, design rationalization, resources, and skills targeting. Instead. it seems like the Rubik's Cube of modern science. Everyone "rediscovers" the same thing over and over again.. "

Seriously, learn some programming and I think you'll come back to electronics real quick!

I think modern electronics is the worst thing that happened to software... With the computers we have now, there is no consequence to bad software, it all runs the same.

Actually, quite the reverse. Cambridge Instruments made electron-beam microfabrictors for the semiconductor industry (where they are mostly used to write the optical masks) and the impression I got was that most integrated circuits were designed for a specific customer for a specific job, and the mass market devices were just those parts that proved adaptable to other - similar - jobs.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

No, modern programmers were the worst thing that's happened to software. 'C' is the worst thing that's happened to modern programmers.

Badly.

There is no consequence to bad software because customers expect bad software.

Seriously, in the SMT world there are "R" versions. Back in the late

The ones (SOT23 - SOT23R) I was looking at recently (Diodes LDOs) had pin-2 fixed and swapped pins 1 and 3. To fix an "aw s..t", I would have expected pin-3 fixed and 1 and 2 swapped. I just figured that they were trying to match the pinout of some other part(s).

They often build one prototype or maybe a few for the military. In the consumer world it's all bleak and dry, no leadership there. Sometimes their people can't even put enough food onto the table. My definition of "world leader" is slightly different.

And it certainly isn't related to common part numbering. At least when the iron curtain was still up the countries behind it were literally begging to get their hand onto western parts. But they needed Dollars or Deutschmarks for that which were hard to come by for them. Although, they had a way of milking western relatives of their citizens for those.

It's cheaper. Burning a brownish lettering into a black plastic chip costs less than silk screen printing.

Real men roll their own :-)

Time is money, but we also have an obligation to pass knowledge on to the next generation and not take it with us when we die. This automatically means there will always be newcomer questions, even when you yourself have reached the ripe old age of 70 or so.

On a freezing cold day " snipped-for-privacy@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz" slipped on the ice, and cried

You are a complete clueless idiot. C rocks. Just finished an other program in it.

You cannot even do modern electronics without C.

BASIC sucks sucks sucks sucks sucks sucks.

C is universal it *shines*.

I rest my case.

What a lie.

Wow, that's an impressive statement.

You can try to shine a turd, but it's still a turd.

Russia was well known for their state mandated TV designs that caused lots of house fires, so what's your point?

There was a news story a few years ago about a new, state of the art auto repair facility built in Moscow. It had everything you could want, except repair parts. They had ignored the fact that the companies making car parts had quotas that matched those of the car assembly plants. The planners didn't require them to make spare parts.

Along with ESR specifications. :)

You have to remember that 'Jan' is too stupid to be able to use XP, which is used by little old ladies around the world with no problems.

I wonder.

Well, what other languages than BASIC do you actually program in?

It is a fact.

Lack of clout and now go into the abstract?

C is about as simple as programing gets. Unlike asm with zillions of different instructions for as many different processors, C knows only a few statements. With those few statements you can do ANYTHING (Turing). It allows you to make your own statements, commands if you will, so is 100% extensible. And it also allows 100% exact typing. What more could you wish than somebody else do the thinking for you :-)

There is a C compiler for practically every processor.

When is the last time you wrote a C program? If ever.

Mmm.... I think you'll find that in both software and electronics, things can get as complex as you'd like them to be. It's not at all "elegant, simple, and obvious" how you build, e.g., a 1GHz op-amp with low noise, input capacitance, and offset voltages, nor is it entirely simple and obvious how you might implement something like a hardware-based MP3 decoder once the real world throws on the constrain of it having to cost $0.25 in quantity.

I do think software tends to be a bit more forgiving in that fixing flaws or adding features often has no "per unit" cost... whereas with hardware it usually means board spins or blue wires.

Yes, it's a wonder you can breathe.

I don't program in BASIC, d*****ad.

What a stupid s*it!

No need to go into the abstract. Turd are physical entities. You can't polish C, so I suppose that would be an abstract idea.

...and you show how simple one can get.

processors,

extensible.

All completely irrelevant.

I have, but now I don't admit to knowing how to spell C. Ew, even the thought makes me feel dirty.

That only means that you *will* have to fix flaws in the software, which costs a *lot* more than people are willing to admit.

True... although today pretty much all CPUs come with bugs (errata) as well, right? Intel's FDiv bug was incredibly expensive, even though realistically it didn't affect that many people at all.

Even op-amps that jump to the opposite rail of what they "should" is arguably a bit of a bug.

But software takes the cake insofar as bugs adding costs, IMO.

Sure, all CPUs come with bugs but as you note *very* few are ever seen. The FDIV bug was an example of the worst. OTOH, all consumer software is riddled with bugs. I suppose it's all cheap to "fix", because it never is.

I don't consider unexpected behavior outside of a part's spec to be a bug in the part at all. It is *certainly* a bug in your circuit.

Yep. I get yelled at for bugs. Programmers get time to make more.

I think there's a difference in design complexity, and running complexity. The design of a good 1GHz op-amp is certainly very complex, but once the design is finished, it's much less complex for another engineer to understand and verify that it works according to specification.

Software has a potential to remain very complex, even after it's finished. The reason is that software programs have a tremendous amount of internal state, and only a tiny portion of the state-space gets visited during a typical run.

A million line program that uses 10^8 bits of state remains very hard to understand and very hard to verify, no matter how smart the engineer.

Hell, both electronics and software are simple--they obey cause and effect, and when you find what's wrong and fix it, it's fixed.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs