DOCSLIB.ORG

Kindergarten Code.Key

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Kindergarten Code.Key I wanted to give this talk because over the past several years I’ve come to appreciate a particular quality in code that I didn’t have a name for. But then I finally found a useful name: kindergarten code. ThisKindergarten talk is a collection of quotes from people much smarter than ICode to give you a sense of this “kindergarten code” and why it’s important. Shawn M Moore @sartak Your code should read like a smart kindergardener wrote it Brent Simmons – Vesper Sync Diary “Since this is a super-critical part of the app, it should read like a smart kindergardener wrote it. Which is exactly how I want all my code to look, come to think of it.” Your code should read like a smart kindergardener wrote it Brent Simmons – Vesper Sync Diary All the damn time I see code that’s confused and more complicated than it needs to be. It’s easy to fall into this trap. But if your code is clear and straightforward, enough that a kindergartener could understand it, then you’re in good shape. Code that looks like through some divine inspiration you got it exactly right the first time Bernie Cosell – Coders at Work “I want every routine you work on to look as if it was just written. I do not want to see any evidence of afterthoughts or things gone wrong followed by something to correct the error or a mysterious piece of code saying, "This routine returns the wrong value every now and then so I've got to fix it." I don't want to see any of that. I want to see code that looks like through some divine inspiration you got it exactly right the first time.” Code that looks like through some divine inspiration you got it exactly right the first time Bernie Cosell – Coders at Work Say as you’re working on something you realize a better way of doing it. You damn well better circle back and improve upon the existing code to use that new style too. You’ll see examples of this done poorly EVERYWHERE YOU LOOK. ! Do not comment out code. git will remember your previous versions. Code confidently! Divine inspiration… you know what, I actually like that better. Let’sDivine go with “Divine Code”. Code Shawn M Moore @sartak Build APIs that steer developers in the right direction Brad Abrams – The Pit of Success “Build platforms that lead developers to write great, high performance code such that developers just fall into doing the “right thing”. Rico called this the Pit of Success. It is the key point of good API design. Build APIs that steer and point developers in the right direction. Types should be defined with a clear contact that communicates effectively how they are to be used. I am not just talking about the docs and samples but in the design of the APIs.” Build APIs that steer developers in the right direction Brad Abrams – The Pit of Success I don’t love the term “pit of success” but I think it’s trying to be the exact opposite of “pit of despair”. But it is what I strive for when I architect something (success, not despair). Apple does a really great job of this with its APIs. There’s a consistency and clarity to the UIKit APIs that just makes you feel like a wizard. There’s an obvious, straightforward way to do things. APIs are orthogonal and work together. That’s why I love Objective C so much. Each time I figured out another step of the process I thought, “Wait, seriously?” And each time Microsoft implicitly replied, “Seriously.” Casey Muratori - The Worst API Ever Made An incredible example of where this was done wrong is described in http://mollyrocket.com/casey/stream_0029.html The author describes an API for a simple feature that basically took weeks to actually get working, because it was so horrifically designed. Don’t do this. Don’t require your users to care about weird implementation details. The takeaway from Casey’s piece is write your synopsis first because it will be free from those unnecessary details. Shorten the conceptual gap between the static program and the dynamic process Edsger W. Dijkstra – A Case against the GO TO Statement (EWD 215) “Our intellectual powers are rather geared to master static relations and our powers to visualize processes evolving in time are relatively poorly developed. For that reason we should do (as wise programmers aware of our limitations) our utmost best to shorten the conceptual gap between the static program and the dynamic process, to make the correspondence between the program (spread out in text space) and the process (spread out in time) as trivial as possible.” Shorten the conceptual gap between the static program and the dynamic process Edsger W. Dijkstra – A Case against the GO TO Statement (EWD 215) Your program is little more than a gigantic text file. When you run your program, the text isn’t itself doing anything. The process that results from your program is a living, breathing beast. It’s important that the program and its process match as closely as possible, otherwise it’s very difficult to understand and modify the program to get the desired behavior out of the process. Shorten the conceptual gap between the static program and the dynamic process Edsger W. Dijkstra – A Case against the GO TO Statement (EWD 215) It’s the difference between a recipe and its resulting dish. What you wouldn’t want in a recipe is nonsensical, extraneous steps. Like if you’re following a recipe and step 4 is flush your toilet. Why the hell is that in the recipe? Because the original guy had to take a leak while he was waiting for his noodles to boil. You might think that’s ridiculous, but it happens ALL THE DAMN TIME in code. “Oh I was trying to fix something so I just left that in there and didn’t bother to remove it when I figured it out that the problem was somewhere else.” Use “git add -p” to select exactly the changes that do what you need and throw the rest away. Trying to compress that rich picture over a very low- bandwidth channel Bret Victor – Media for Thinking the Unthinkable “The authors have a very rich picture in their heads. And they're trying to compress that picture to transmit over a very low-bandwidth channel, which is this stream of symbols. So it's a very lossy compression. And we've got the reader on the other end trying to decompress this picture into their own head. And it doesn't work very well.” Trying to compress that rich picture over a very low- bandwidth channel Bret Victor – Media for Thinking the Unthinkable This quote was talking about a scientific research paper, but it applies equally well to code. The programmer knows in their head what they’re trying to accomplish. They have to communicate this idea using the programming language. There’s no way to encode all of that rich picture into text. So to make sure that there’s no miscommunication, you want to be very precise, very explicit, and overly critical. I’d go so far as to say that you want to do this in all technical communication, whether it be code, tests, documentation, IRC channel, etc. Programs must be written for people to read Abelson & Sussman - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs “We want to establish the idea that a computer language is not just a way of getting a computer to perform operations but rather that it is a novel formal medium for expressing ideas about methodology. Thus, programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” Programs must be written for people to read Abelson & Sussman - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs I’m sure you’ve seen this quote before. This is the same idea as the previous few quotes. It is VITAL that your code be comprehensible or it becomes a liability. Quick informal poll, has anyone had to modify code that wasn’t incredible? Did that go well? Do you wish the author had been more careful putting together that code? In less than a minute Dan found the methods involved, made the (relatively major) changes Alan Kay – The Early History of Smalltalk “Steve Jobs said he didn't like the blt-style scrolling we were using and asked if we could do it in a smooth continuous style. In less than a minute Dan found the methods involved, made the (relatively major) changes and scrolling was now continuous! This shocked the visitors, especially the programmers among them, as they had never seen a really powerful incremental system before.” In less than a minute Dan found the methods involved, made the (relatively major) changes Alan Kay – The Early History of Smalltalk This is an anecdote I like that reflects what having this clarity in your code. There’s a certain beautiful competence you earn by having your code well- formed and comprehensible. Anything that doesn’t live up to that beauty is offensive to me. If only you could read my private Slack conversations… :) The most depressing thing… is a chunk of code… you dare not modify Simon Peyton Jones – Coders at Work “The most depressing thing about life as a programmer, I think, is if you're faced with a chunk of code that either someone else wrote or, worse still, you wrote yourself but you no longer dare to modify.” The most depressing thing… is a chunk of code… you dare not modify Simon Peyton Jones – Coders at Work I’m sure no one here has been in this situation before.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • QATAR ASW ONLINE SCRIPT V.8.0 Pages
    “DEXIGN THE FUTURE: Innovation for Exponential Times” ARNOLD WASSERMAN COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS VIRGINIA COMMONWEALTH UNIVERSITY IN QATAR 2 MAY 2016 مساء الخير .Good afternoon It is an honor to be invited to address you on this important day. Today you artists and designers graduate into the future. Do you think about the future? Of course you do. But how do you think about the future? Is the future tangible - or is it intangible ? Is it a subject for rational deliberation? Or is it an imagined fantasy that forever recedes before us? Is the future simply whatever happens to us next? Or is it something we deliberately create? Can we Dexign the Future? What I would like us to think about for the next few moments is how creative professionals like yourselves might think about the future. What I have to say applies as much to art as it does to design. Both are technologies of creative innovation. I will take the liberty here of calling it all design. My speech is also available online. There you can follow a number of links to what I will talk about here. The future you are graduating into is an exponential future. What that means is that everything is happening faster and at an accelerating rate. For example, human knowledge is doubling every 12 months. And that curve is accelerating. An IBM researcher foresees that within a few years knowledge will be doubling every 12 hours as we build out the internet of things globally. This acceleration of human knowledge implies that the primary skill of a knowledge worker like yourself is research, analysis and synthesis of the not-yet-known.
    [Show full text]
  • Simula Mother Tongue for a Generation of Nordic Programmers
    Simula! Mother Tongue! for a Generation of! Nordic Programmers! Yngve Sundblad HCI, CSC, KTH! ! KTH - CSC (School of Computer Science and Communication) Yngve Sundblad – Simula OctoberYngve 2010Sundblad! Inspired by Ole-Johan Dahl, 1931-2002, and Kristen Nygaard, 1926-2002" “From the cold waters of Norway comes Object-Oriented Programming” " (first line in Bertrand Meyer#s widely used text book Object Oriented Software Construction) ! ! KTH - CSC (School of Computer Science and Communication) Yngve Sundblad – Simula OctoberYngve 2010Sundblad! Simula concepts 1967" •# Class of similar Objects (in Simula declaration of CLASS with data and actions)! •# Objects created as Instances of a Class (in Simula NEW object of class)! •# Data attributes of a class (in Simula type declared as parameters or internal)! •# Method attributes are patterns of action (PROCEDURE)! •# Message passing, calls of methods (in Simula dot-notation)! •# Subclasses that inherit from superclasses! •# Polymorphism with several subclasses to a superclass! •# Co-routines (in Simula Detach – Resume)! •# Encapsulation of data supporting abstractions! ! KTH - CSC (School of Computer Science and Communication) Yngve Sundblad – Simula OctoberYngve 2010Sundblad! Simula example BEGIN! REF(taxi) t;" CLASS taxi(n); INTEGER n;! BEGIN ! INTEGER pax;" PROCEDURE book;" IF pax<n THEN pax:=pax+1;! pax:=n;" END of taxi;! t:-NEW taxi(5);" t.book; t.book;" print(t.pax)" END! Output: 7 ! ! KTH - CSC (School of Computer Science and Communication) Yngve Sundblad – Simula OctoberYngve 2010Sundblad!
    [Show full text]
  • Design and Implementation of an Optionally-Typed Functional Programming Language
    Design and Implementation of an Optionally-Typed Functional Programming Language Shaobai Li Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences University of California at Berkeley Technical Report No. UCB/EECS-2017-215 http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2017/EECS-2017-215.html December 14, 2017 Copyright © 2017, by the author(s). All rights reserved. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission. Design and Implementation of an Optionally-Typed Functional Programming Language by Patrick S. Li A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Engineering { Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Koushik Sen, Chair Adjunct Professor Jonathan Bachrach Professor George Necula Professor Sara McMains Fall 2017 Design and Implementation of an Optionally-Typed Functional Programming Language Copyright 2017 by Patrick S. Li 1 Abstract Design and Implementation of an Optionally-Typed Functional Programming Language by Patrick S. Li Doctor of Philosophy in Engineering { Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences University of California, Berkeley Professor Koushik Sen, Chair This thesis describes the motivation, design, and implementation of L.B. Stanza, an optionally- typed functional programming language aimed at helping programmers tackle the complexity of architecting large programs and increasing their productivity across the entire software development life cycle.
    [Show full text]
  • A Model of Inheritance for Declarative Visual Programming Languages
    An Abstract Of The Dissertation Of Rebecca Djang for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science presented on December 17, 1998. Title: Similarity Inheritance: A Model of Inheritance for Declarative Visual Programming Languages. Abstract approved: Margaret M. Burnett Declarative visual programming languages (VPLs), including spreadsheets, make up a large portion of both research and commercial VPLs. Spreadsheets in particular enjoy a wide audience, including end users. Unfortunately, spreadsheets and most other declarative VPLs still suffer from some of the problems that have been solved in other languages, such as ad-hoc (cut-and-paste) reuse of code which has been remedied in object-oriented languages, for example, through the code-reuse mechanism of inheritance. We believe spreadsheets and other declarative VPLs can benefit from the addition of an inheritance-like mechanism for fine-grained code reuse. This dissertation first examines the opportunities for supporting reuse inherent in declarative VPLs, and then introduces similarity inheritance and describes a prototype of this model in the research spreadsheet language Forms/3. Similarity inheritance is very flexible, allowing multiple granularities of code sharing and even mutual inheritance; it includes explicit representations of inherited code and all sharing relationships, and it subsumes the current spreadsheet mechanisms for formula propagation, providing a gradual migration from simple formula reuse to more sophisticated uses of inheritance among objects. Since the inheritance model separates inheritance from types, we investigate what notion of types is appropriate to support reuse of functions on different types (operation polymorphism). Because it is important to us that immediate feedback, which is characteristic of many VPLs, be preserved, including feedback with respect to type errors, we introduce a model of types suitable for static type inference in the presence of operation polymorphism with similarity inheritance.
    [Show full text]
  • Reading List
    EECS 101 Introduction to Computer Science Dinda, Spring, 2009 An Introduction to Computer Science For Everyone Reading List Note: You do not need to read or buy all of these. The syllabus and/or class web page describes the required readings and what books to buy. For readings that are not in the required books, I will either provide pointers to web documents or hand out copies in class. Books David Harel, Computers Ltd: What They Really Can’t Do, Oxford University Press, 2003. Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-month: Essays on Software Engineering, 20th Anniversary Edition, Addison-Wesley, 1995. Joel Spolsky, Joel on Software: And on Diverse and Occasionally Related Matters That Will Prove of Interest to Software Developers, Designers, and Managers, and to Those Who, Whether by Good Fortune or Ill Luck, Work with Them in Some Capacity, APress, 2004. Most content is available for free from Spolsky’s Blog (see http://www.joelonsoftware.com) Paul Graham, Hackers and Painters, O’Reilly, 2004. See also Graham’s site: http://www.paulgraham.com/ Martin Davis, The Universal Computer: The Road from Leibniz to Turing, W.W. Norton and Company, 2000. Ted Nelson, Computer Lib/Dream Machines, 1974. This book is now very rare and very expensive, which is sad given how visionary it was. Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography, Anchor, 2000. Douglas Hofstadter, Goedel, Escher, Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid, 20th Anniversary Edition, Basic Books, 1999. Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, 2nd Edition, Prentice Hall, 2003.
    [Show full text]
  • STEPS Toward Expressive Programming Systems, 2010 Progress Report Submitted to the National Science Foundation (NSF) October 2010
    STEPS Toward Expressive Programming Systems, 2010 Progress Report Submitted to the National Science Foundation (NSF) October 2010 Viewpoints Research Institute, 1209 Grand Central Avenue, Glendale, CA 91201 t: (818) 332-3001 f: (818) 244-9761 VPRI Technical Report TR-2010-004 NSF Award: 0639876 Year 4 Annual Report: October 2010 STEPS Toward Expressive Programming Systems Viewpoints Research Institute, Glendale CA Important Note For Viewing The PDF Of This Report We have noticed that Adobe Reader and Acrobat do not do the best rendering of scaled pictures. Try different magnifications (e.g. 118%) to find the best scale. Apple Preview does a better job. Table Of Contents STEPS For The General Public 2 STEPS Project Introduction 3 STEPS In 2010 5 The “Frank” Personal Computing System 5 The Parts Of Frank 7 1. DBjr 7 a. User Interface Approach 9 b. Some of the Document Styles We’ve Made 11 2. LWorld 17 3. Gezira/Nile 18 4. NotSqueak 20 5. Networking 20 6. OMeta 22 7. Nothing 22 2010 STEPS Experiments And Papers 23 Training and Development 26 Outreach Activities 26 References 27 Appendix 1: Nothing Grammar in OMeta 28 Appendix 2: A Copying Garbage Collector in Nothing 30 VPRI Technical Report TR-2010-004 A new requirement for NSF reports is to include a few jargon‑free paragraphs to help the general public un‑ derstand the nature of the research. This seems like a very good idea. Here is our first attempt. STEPS For The General Public If computing is important—for daily life, learning, business, national defense, jobs, and more—then qualitatively advancing computing is extremely important.
    [Show full text]
  • EDSGER W. DIJKSTRA Turing Award 1972 Contributions To: Compiler Design Algorithms Formal Verification Programming Languages
    LISP IN HPC MARCO HEISIG [email protected] 0 TABLE OF CONTENTS Motivational Quotes The Lisp Language Performance Our Research Questions & Answers 1 MOTIVATIONAL QUOTES … showing you that Lisp is not just another programming language 2 EDSGER W. DIJKSTRA Turing Award 1972 contributions to: compiler design algorithms formal verification programming languages 3 EDSGER W. DIJKSTRA FORTRAN's tragic fate has been its wide acceptance, mentally chaining thousands and thousands of programmers to our past mistakes. 3 - 1 EDSGER W. DIJKSTRA Lisp has jokingly been called "the most intelligent way to misuse a computer". I think that description is a great compliment because it transmits the full flavor of liberation […] 3 - 2 ALAN KAY Turing Award 2003 Inventor of Object Oriented Programming Graphical User Interface Smalltalk 4 ALAN KAY I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind. Java and C++ make you think that the new ideas are like the old ones. Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS. 4 - 1 ALAN KAY [Lisp is] … the greatest single programming language ever designed 4 - 2 RICHARD M. STALLMAN Founder of the Free Software Foundation Author of GCC GDB Emacs GNU Make … 5 RICHARD M. STALLMAN The most powerful programming language is Lisp. […] Once you learn Lisp you will see what is missing in most other languages. 5 - 1 OUR MOTIVATION The primary goal of a language should be the elegant notation of algorithms. Mandatory requirements should therefore be automatic memory management proper integers, fractions and complex numbers higher order functions (also at runtime) the possibility of reaching machine peak performance (computational completeness ?) 6 THE LISP LANGUAGE 7 THE LISP LANGUAGE discovered 1958 by John McCarthy short for LISt Processing Modern dialects: Common Lisp Scheme Clojure 8 PAIRS AND LISTS ;; basic datastructure: The pair! (a .
    [Show full text]
  • Arxiv:2106.11534V1 [Cs.DL] 22 Jun 2021 2 Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, China 3 University of Southampton, Southampton, U.K
    Noname manuscript No. (will be inserted by the editor) Turing Award elites revisited: patterns of productivity, collaboration, authorship and impact Yinyu Jin1 · Sha Yuan1∗ · Zhou Shao2, 4 · Wendy Hall3 · Jie Tang4 Received: date / Accepted: date Abstract The Turing Award is recognized as the most influential and presti- gious award in the field of computer science(CS). With the rise of the science of science (SciSci), a large amount of bibliographic data has been analyzed in an attempt to understand the hidden mechanism of scientific evolution. These include the analysis of the Nobel Prize, including physics, chemistry, medicine, etc. In this article, we extract and analyze the data of 72 Turing Award lau- reates from the complete bibliographic data, fill the gap in the lack of Turing Award analysis, and discover the development characteristics of computer sci- ence as an independent discipline. First, we show most Turing Award laureates have long-term and high-quality educational backgrounds, and more than 61% of them have a degree in mathematics, which indicates that mathematics has played a significant role in the development of computer science. Secondly, the data shows that not all scholars have high productivity and high h-index; that is, the number of publications and h-index is not the leading indicator for evaluating the Turing Award. Third, the average age of awardees has increased from 40 to around 70 in recent years. This may be because new breakthroughs take longer, and some new technologies need time to prove their influence. Besides, we have also found that in the past ten years, international collabo- ration has experienced explosive growth, showing a new paradigm in the form of collaboration.
    [Show full text]
  • Thinking Object Oriented
    Chapter 1 Thinking Ob ject Oriented Ob ject-oriented programming has b ecome exceedingly p opular in the past few years. Soft- ware pro ducers rush to release ob ject-oriented versions of their pro ducts. Countless b o oks and sp ecial issues of academic and trade journals have app eared on the sub ject. Students strive to b e able somehow to list \exp erience in ob ject-oriented programming" on their re- sumes. To judge from this frantic activity, ob ject-oriented programming is b eing greeted with an even greater p opularity than wehave seen in the past heralding earlier revolutionary ideas, such as \structured programming" or \exp ert systems". My intent in this rst chapter is to investigate and explain the basic principles of ob ject oriented programming, and in doing so to illustrate the following two prop ositions: OOP is a revolutionary idea, totally unlikeanything that has come b efore in program- ming. OOP is an evolutionary step, following naturally on the heels of earlier programming abstractions. 1.1 Why is Ob ject-Oriented Programming Popular? To judge from much of the p opular press, the following represent a few of the p ossible reasons why Ob ject-oriented programming has, in the past decade, b ecome so p opular: The hop e that it will quickly and easily lead to increased pro ductivity and improved reliability help solve the software crises. The desire for an easy transition from existing languages. The resonant similarity to techniques of thinking ab out problems in other domains.
    [Show full text]
  • The Alto and Ethernet Hardware
    Personal Distributed Computing: The Alto and Ethernet Hardware Charles P. Thacker Systems Research Center Digital Equipment Corp. 130 Lytton Avenue Palo Alto, CA 94301 Abstract • In addition to the workstations, the network contains serners---nodes that provide capabilities Between 1972 and 1980, the first distributed personal that need to be shared, either for economic or computing system was built at the Xerox Palo Alto logical reasons. Research Center. The system was composed of a number of Alto workstations connected by an Ether- Timesharing systems grew primarily from the vi- net local network. It also included servers that pro- sion of man-computer symbiosis presented by J.C.R. vided centralized facilities. This paper describes the Licklider in a landmark 1960 paper [29]. Efforts to development of the hardware that was the basis of realize the possibilities presented in this paper occu- the system. pied the creative talents of many computer science re- searchers through the sixties and beyond. Distributed personal computing systems build on this view of the Introduction way computers and people interact by providing a level of responsiveness that timesharing systems can- In the last few years, a new type of computing en- not achieve. vironment has become available. These distributed personal computing systems represent another step The first distributed personal computing system was built at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the process, started by timesharing, of bringing over a period spanning 1972 to 1980. The workstation computing power closer to the user. Although many used in this system was the Alto [36]; the network was variations are possible, these systems share a number of characteristics: Ethernet.
    [Show full text]
  • Alan Mathison Turing and the Turing Award Winners
    Alan Turing and the Turing Award Winners A Short Journey Through the History of Computer TítuloScience do capítulo Luis Lamb, 22 June 2012 Slides by Luis C. Lamb Alan Mathison Turing A.M. Turing, 1951 Turing by Stephen Kettle, 2007 by Slides by Luis C. Lamb Assumptions • I assume knowlege of Computing as a Science. • I shall not talk about computing before Turing: Leibniz, Babbage, Boole, Gödel... • I shall not detail theorems or algorithms. • I shall apologize for omissions at the end of this presentation. • Comprehensive information about Turing can be found at http://www.mathcomp.leeds.ac.uk/turing2012/ • The full version of this talk is available upon request. Slides by Luis C. Lamb Alan Mathison Turing § Born 23 June 1912: 2 Warrington Crescent, Maida Vale, London W9 Google maps Slides by Luis C. Lamb Alan Mathison Turing: short biography • 1922: Attends Hazlehurst Preparatory School • ’26: Sherborne School Dorset • ’31: King’s College Cambridge, Maths (graduates in ‘34). • ’35: Elected to Fellowship of King’s College Cambridge • ’36: Publishes “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheindungsproblem”, Journal of the London Math. Soc. • ’38: PhD Princeton (viva on 21 June) : “Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals”, supervised by Alonzo Church. • Letter to Philipp Hall: “I hope Hitler will not have invaded England before I come back.” • ’39 Joins Bletchley Park: designs the “Bombe”. • ’40: First Bombes are fully operational • ’41: Breaks the German Naval Enigma. • ’42-44: Several contibutions to war effort on codebreaking; secure speech devices; computing. • ’45: Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) Computer. Slides by Luis C.
    [Show full text]
  • Programming Environments • Mastering Different Programming Paradigms
    Overview • Motivation • Why study programming languages? • Some key concepts Introduction 1 2 What is a programming language? 3 4 What is a programming language? On language and thought (1) “...there is no agreement on what a programming Idea: language effects thought language really is and what its main purpose is supposed to be. Is a programming language a “The Language of Thought Hypothesis (LOTH) tool for instructing machines? A means of communicating postulates that thought and thinking take place in a between programmers? A vehicle for expressing high-level mental language. This language consists of a system of designs? A notation for algorithms? A way of expressing representations that is physically realized in the brain of relationships between concepts? A tool for experimenta- thinkers and has a combinatorial syntax (and semantics) tion? A means of controlling computerized devices? My such that operations on representations are causally view is that a general-purpose programming language must sensitive only to the syntactic properties of be all of those to serve its diverse set of users. The only thing a language cannot be – and survive – is a mere representations. …” collection of ‘‘neat’’ features.” -- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy -- http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/language-thought/ -- Bjarne Stroustrup, The Design and Evolution of C++ http://www.cs.umbc.edu/331/papers/dne_notes.pdf Still controversial for natural languages: eskimos, numbers, etc. 5 6 On language and thought (2) On languages and thought (3) The tools we use have a profound (and “What doesn't exist are really powerful devious!) influence on our thinking habits, general forms of arguing with computers right now.
    [Show full text]