CLs are deterministic, HLs are not. ex: "Give me that thing over there."
CLs can be decomposed into a state machine, HLs cannot (or if they can, it's an unsolved problem) ex: "I love you"
Creative writing can be thought of as functional in the sense that it strives to create thoughts or emotions in the audience or reader.
But the emotions and thoughts to be created can not be predicted even if the audience is defined as a set of variables, machines have predictable outputs that's why they are programmed (given all variables).
I just don't see how a human language fits the "Automata Theory" definition of a machine.
Someone mentionned that the primary goal of code is a language to talk to the machine, not to exchange ideas. I think this is a valid point, but in the case we care, the crypto law created a particular circumstance where one was unable to communicate an idea (crypto algorithm) via source code.
I understand that, I was only responding to someone saying that he primarily uses code to communicate ideas. What I was saying was that that's ok, but not the primary function of code (which you seem to agree)
So for that particular case, the code was *really* used as a way to communicate an idea to others. If this guy is able to phone somebody else and describe the algorithm, why should it be prohibited that he sends a page of source code instead. Source code here is clearly used as a way of communicating something to others, not giving instructions to the machine.
Your point here just makes me wonder now, what about pseudo code ? If the problem here is not communicating the idea but the exchange of code that can be compiled , what about pseudocode ? Can that be posted and escape these restrictions ?
It's not a device until you compile it. High level languages are mainly for human use, or we'd all still be writing programs by toggling 32 switches on or off and then hitting enter.
CS - 101 Compiling has nothing to do with wheter a program is a "machine" or not, just like an algorithm has nothing to do wheter it runs on a computer as you know it today or a DNA strand. Again (see my post above) programs translate to state machines. The types of machines we're talking about here have nothing to do with hardware nor 1's or 0's.
What's the difference between a regular computer language (c,java,perl) vs "compiled" machine code besides the obvious levels of complexity and lack of portability (machine code) ?
Just asking since it seems rulings are favoring "source code" distribution but not "binary" distribution. Seems to me these 2 things are the same if you look at them from a different point of view. Hey, I know a couple of people that still program at the machine level !
However, I have to wonder about the whole code == speech thing. I mean, okay, on the one hand, you're talking about a *language*, in which you can express ideas (heck, people write poetry in Perl), but on the other hand, a program is essentially a machine.
Exactly how I feel, can't programs be looked upon as a sort of deterministic (finate?) state machine ? And the main purpose of a program (and a computer language) is to build such machine so that the computer can execute said code. The other uses for programs are secondary; sample code, er... poetry, etc.
Anyways, I'm against the stupid crypto laws, but I don't see the code / free speech thing clearly yet. I'm wondering if many of us are agreeing to it because it might be the one argument to defeat these archaic restrictions imposed by the goverment.
Not trying to be nitpicky (and I'm not really disagreeing with your post) but...
You can use a computer language to communicate ideas (ie code examples, explaining an algorithm, exam question, etc) but that's not their main purpose. In other words , computer languages can be used to communicate ideas but their main purpose is to instruct a computer (hence "computer" language).
This is probably what they meant by "functional aspect". It's sad that they use this for the stupid crypto laws, but I'm not sure computer languages are free speech. If they are free speech (which I'm not really against,but confused) then other things like hardware diagrams, mathematical formulas, plans for a house, etc should also be considered free speech (they probably are ?).
My last post was refuting the idea posted that the list was only for "PC luminaries" (see the comment before my response). So I don't know what your reply means in that context.
My first post was just expressing a little disbelief that these 2 guys could be missed, since in my world view they are about the foremost contributors to computer science. Of course, I understand the list is not supposed to be complete, but that doesn't negate the fact that I'm surprised nobody mentioned them.
Where do we report moderator abuse. I see no reason why this comment has to be moderated down !!!
Relying on others negative opinions ...
on
Taking May 19 Off?
·
· Score: 1
... tsk tsk. Of course many weren't going to like the movie (although even the negative reviews say they liked it) , but others loved the movie too. Did you see the latest reviews at the www.aint-it-cool-news.com ???
Anyways, even if Darth Maul is not in the movie for too long, he seems dark and cool enough. And remember, Lucas has said this will be the least dark of all the prequels, probably so it better contrasts to the clone war in 2 , and 3 which will probably be too dark (Darth Vader's birth).
Then why the heck are these two listed ??? I'd wager there are more PC programs written in C than PC programs written in Phyton and Perl combined (and multiplied by 10,000 taken to the power of 5)!!!!
... but decided not to. My wife is not the biggest Star Wars fan in the world, but I want to share the experience with her. She gets a kick out of watching me watch the Star Wars trailers and numerous TV reports on it, plus she's started to become more interested in it because of my excitement.
This is one of those things that you might want to share with your loved ones, specially your family and friends. The repeat viewings that will follow (for sure) I can do alone, but the first one has to be shared:)
Page 2 of the review says page 3 has spoilers so don't bother reading this.
Anyways, 2 hours and 15 minutes is too short ??? Most movies todays are not even 2 hours long. And anyways, we know there are 2 sequals continuing the story after this.
On another note: How is he going to explain the absence of 10e6 droids in the later films? Would you downgrade to storm troopers from robot legions? I'm sure it will be explained though. A backlash against intelligent droids?
Remember in A New Hope how in the cantena the bartender tell's C3PO and R2 "We don't allow your kind in here".
Also, anybody notice the similarities between stormtroopers and the battle droids ? I wonder what it means...
OK kiddies, enough. My boyfriend works for a toy store, and they had to open at midnight to sell Star Wars toys. The lines reached across the plaza! This is ridiculous. All you people who want your stuff to become collectors' items are in for a disappointment, because too many people have the same idea.
Most of us are not collectors !!! I bought my toys because I like to display them in my computer room/office/etc, or even (*eck*) play with them.:)
don't, but then again, I still have trouble understanding the hype about a cliched western set in space with lots of special effects. *shrug*
It's because we all have different... TASTES... ta-ta !!! I don't wonder why people don't like the movie, why are you wasting your time doing the opossite ??? Anyways, your view in that regard is definetly in the minority.
BTW - I love Star Wars, and I hate westerns. Star Wars, was (when I was a child) and is (now with TPM) one of the few movies that can stimulate my imagination. It makes me want to leave my computer alone and start drawing again, creating new worlds, characters and other images. Very few movies can affect me this way...
He now has more positive reviews. Cheez, of course there are going to be people dissapointed with the film, we're all different ! Don't depend on someone else's opinion and form your own.
Certification for programmers is a bit rediculeous. Is html code or data? What languages will the certification be in? Different certification for each language? What libraries? MFC? OWL? or ANSI? How about OS? What data structures? Will code formating be in it? Who will administer it?
Once again, nobody is talking about certifying technologies ! We need to certify theory , practice, design techniques, testing , etc. When you went to school , what was the emphasis, specific languages or theory ?
In my school, we couldn't get credit for taking classes like "C++" or "Java", our professors expected us to learn these things on our own. This is the right aproach, and it's what separates the people who will always succed in this field (technology independent) to those who will one day be obsolete (married to a certain platform, language, etc).
Not a bad article, balanced, researched, etc, but how do you certify a field which changes so quickly ?
Technology changes quickly, theory and general practice does not.
By the time anybody has set up a reasonable professional board and exam for a particular skill, the skill would be redundant. Only the lowest common denominator skills (eg write a quicksort routine) could possibly be tested.
Algorithm analysis could be tested, many people out there can't figure out the complexity of simple algorithms, nor do some know what big O means !!!! But certification could concentrate on general design principles and practices, and most notably testing.
Professional qualifications have very little to do with protecting the public, and are much more designed to protect the profession. Professions which change slowly (eg medicine, civil engineering etc) can get away with it and justify themselves by pretending to protect the public [snip]
Last time I checked , NP complete problems have not been solved;) Our field changes slowly too, it's just the technology that keeps changing all the time. Don't get married to technology.
find / -name \*.java -print|xargs rm
Interesting sig, language wars were not part of my CS curriculm, I hope this doesn't imply yours was.
I see a lot of posts about MS Certification being useless, and some saying certification would expire in 5 years or so. This misses the point. When I went to school for my CS degree, most of the courses went beyond specific technology (computer languages, OS, APIs) and concentrated on a lot of theory.
Theory will not change that much (if ever). NP complete problems, finate state automata, algorithm theory, compiler theory, discrete math, general testing and engineering principles, etc. Some of this stuff could be certifiable.
But we need some method of certification just like other professional organizations do, specially for code that affects human life (radiation machines, airtraffic control, military). The certification could be based on the theory and practices of our field, not current technology. This of course would be very difficult to do (such a test), but it's worth a try if we want to advance the field.
BTW...A lot of people out there are just coders, they live in their little OS or favorite computer language and hang on to it for most of their careers, others are more rounded and understand the principles no matter what the latest technology fad is currently.
Resist the dark side !!! Oh man, why did they have to release it so soon ?????????? I feel like I know too much about the movie already, oh well, there should still be plenty of surprises...
Darth Maul, Darth Vader, Ki Adi Mundi, Prince Xixor (from Dark Forces), a storm tropper and an Emperor's Royal Guardsman(my favorite, until Darth Maul).
Slashdot Mirror
HL - Human Language
CL - Computer Language
CLs are deterministic, HLs are not.
ex: "Give me that thing over there."
CLs can be decomposed into a state machine, HLs cannot (or if they can, it's an unsolved problem)
ex: "I love you"
Creative writing can be thought of as functional in the sense that it strives to create thoughts or emotions in the audience or reader.
But the emotions and thoughts to be created can not be predicted even if the audience is defined as a set of variables, machines have predictable outputs that's why they are programmed (given all variables).
I just don't see how a human language fits the "Automata Theory" definition of a machine.
Someone mentionned that the primary goal of code is a language to talk to the machine, not to exchange ideas. I think this is a valid point, but in the case we care, the crypto law created a particular circumstance where one was unable to communicate an idea (crypto algorithm) via source code.
I understand that, I was only responding to someone saying that he primarily uses code to communicate ideas. What I was saying was that that's ok, but not the primary function of code (which you seem to agree)
So for that particular case, the code was *really* used as a way to communicate an idea to others. If this guy is able to phone somebody else and describe the algorithm, why should it be prohibited that he sends a page of source code instead. Source code here is clearly used as a way of communicating something to others, not giving instructions to the machine.
Your point here just makes me wonder now, what about pseudo code ? If the problem here is not communicating the idea but the exchange of code that can be compiled , what about pseudocode ? Can that be posted and escape these restrictions ?
Just wondering.
It's not a device until you compile it. High level languages are mainly for human use, or we'd all still be writing programs by toggling 32 switches on or off and then hitting enter.
CS - 101
Compiling has nothing to do with wheter a program is a "machine" or not, just like an algorithm has nothing to do wheter it runs on a computer as you know it today or a DNA strand. Again (see my post above) programs translate to state machines. The types of machines we're talking about here have nothing to do with hardware nor 1's or 0's.
What's the difference between a regular computer language (c,java,perl) vs "compiled" machine code besides the obvious levels of complexity and lack of portability (machine code) ?
Just asking since it seems rulings are favoring "source code" distribution but not "binary" distribution. Seems to me these 2 things are the same if you look at them from a different point of view. Hey, I know a couple of people that still program at the machine level !
However, I have to wonder about the whole code == speech thing. I mean, okay, on the one hand, you're talking about a *language*, in which you can express ideas (heck, people write poetry in Perl), but on the other hand, a program is essentially a machine.
... poetry, etc.
Exactly how I feel, can't programs be looked upon as a sort of deterministic (finate?) state machine ?
And the main purpose of a program (and a computer language) is to build such machine so that the computer can execute said code. The other uses for programs are secondary; sample code, er
Anyways, I'm against the stupid crypto laws, but I don't see the code / free speech thing clearly yet. I'm wondering if many of us are agreeing to it because it might be the one argument to defeat these archaic restrictions imposed by the goverment.
Not trying to be nitpicky (and I'm not really disagreeing with your post) but ...
You can use a computer language to communicate ideas (ie code examples, explaining an algorithm, exam question, etc) but that's not their main purpose. In other words , computer languages can be used to communicate ideas but their main purpose is to instruct a computer (hence "computer" language).
This is probably what they meant by "functional aspect". It's sad that they use this for the stupid crypto laws, but I'm not sure computer languages are free speech. If they are free speech (which I'm not really against,but confused) then other things like hardware diagrams, mathematical formulas, plans for a house, etc should also be considered free speech (they probably are ?).
Johnny Storm, the Human Torch says that. You need to buy more comic books pal ...
My last post was refuting the idea posted that the list was only for "PC luminaries" (see the comment before my response). So I don't know what your reply means in that context.
My first post was just expressing a little disbelief that these 2 guys could be missed, since in my world view they are about the foremost contributors to computer science. Of course, I understand the list is not supposed to be complete, but that doesn't negate the fact that I'm surprised nobody mentioned them.
Where do we report moderator abuse. I see no reason why this comment has to be moderated down !!!
... tsk tsk. Of course many weren't going to like the movie (although even the negative reviews say they liked it) , but others loved the movie too. Did you see the latest reviews at the www.aint-it-cool-news.com ???
Anyways, even if Darth Maul is not in the movie for too long, he seems dark and cool enough. And remember, Lucas has said this will be the least dark of all the prequels, probably so it better contrasts to the clone war in 2 , and 3 which will probably be too dark (Darth Vader's birth).
Then why the heck are these two listed ???
I'd wager there are more PC programs written in C than PC programs written in Phyton and Perl combined (and multiplied by 10,000 taken to the power of 5)!!!!
Oh my *gosh* , how could they miss this ??????
... but decided not to. My wife is not the biggest Star Wars fan in the world, but I want to share the experience with her. She gets a kick out of watching me watch the Star Wars trailers and numerous TV reports on it, plus she's started to become more interested in it because of my excitement.
:)
This is one of those things that you might want to share with your loved ones, specially your family and friends. The repeat viewings that will follow (for sure) I can do alone, but the first one has to be shared
Page 2 of the review says page 3 has spoilers so don't bother reading this.
Anyways, 2 hours and 15 minutes is too short ??? Most movies todays are not even 2 hours long. And anyways, we know there are 2 sequals continuing the story after this.
Stop the whining , go see the movie !!!
On another note: How is he going to explain the absence of 10e6 droids in the later films? Would you downgrade to storm troopers from robot legions? I'm sure it will be explained though. A backlash against intelligent droids?
...
Remember in A New Hope how in the cantena the bartender tell's C3PO and R2 "We don't allow your kind in here".
Also, anybody notice the similarities between stormtroopers and the battle droids ? I wonder what it means
OK kiddies, enough. My boyfriend works for a toy store, and they had to open at midnight to sell Star Wars toys. The lines reached across the plaza! This is ridiculous. All you people who want your stuff to become collectors' items are in for a disappointment, because too many people have the same idea.
:)
... TASTES ... ta-ta !!! I don't wonder why people don't like the movie, why are you wasting your time doing the opossite ??? Anyways, your view in that regard is definetly in the minority.
...
Most of us are not collectors !!! I bought my toys because I like to display them in my computer room/office/etc, or even (*eck*) play with them.
don't, but then again, I still have trouble understanding the hype about a cliched western set in space with lots of special effects. *shrug*
It's because we all have different
BTW - I love Star Wars, and I hate westerns. Star Wars, was (when I was a child) and is (now with TPM) one of the few movies that can stimulate my imagination. It makes me want to leave my computer alone and start drawing again, creating new worlds, characters and other images. Very few movies can affect me this way
He now has more positive reviews. Cheez, of course there are going to be people dissapointed with the film, we're all different ! Don't depend on someone else's opinion and form your own.
Go see the movie !
www.aint-it-cool-news.com
Certification for programmers is a bit rediculeous. Is html code or data? What languages will the certification be in? Different certification for each language? What libraries? MFC? OWL? or ANSI? How about OS? What data structures? Will code formating be in it? Who will administer it?
Once again, nobody is talking about certifying technologies ! We need to certify theory , practice, design techniques, testing , etc. When you went to school , what was the emphasis, specific languages or theory ?
In my school, we couldn't get credit for taking classes like "C++" or "Java", our professors expected us to learn these things on our own. This is the right aproach, and it's what separates the people who will always succed in this field (technology independent) to those who will one day be obsolete (married to a certain platform, language, etc).
Seems modorators are mainly against certification, please be impartial and moderate these type of intelligent responses/posts too !
Not a bad article, balanced, researched, etc, but how do you certify a field which changes so quickly ?
;) Our field changes slowly too, it's just the technology that keeps changing all the time. Don't get married to technology.
Technology changes quickly, theory and general practice does not.
By the time anybody has set up a reasonable professional board and exam for a particular skill, the skill would be redundant. Only the lowest common denominator skills (eg write a quicksort routine) could possibly be tested.
Algorithm analysis could be tested, many people out there can't figure out the complexity of simple algorithms, nor do some know what big O means !!!! But certification could concentrate on general design principles and practices, and most notably testing.
Professional qualifications have very little to do with protecting the public, and are much more designed to protect the profession. Professions which change slowly (eg medicine, civil engineering etc) can get away with it and justify themselves by pretending to protect the public [snip]
Last time I checked , NP complete problems have not been solved
find / -name \*.java -print|xargs rm
Interesting sig, language wars were not part of my CS curriculm, I hope this doesn't imply yours was.
I see a lot of posts about MS Certification being useless, and some saying certification would expire in 5 years or so. This misses the point. When I went to school for my CS degree, most of the courses went beyond specific technology (computer languages, OS, APIs) and concentrated on a lot of theory.
...A lot of people out there are just coders, they live in their little OS or favorite computer language and hang on to it for most of their careers, others are more rounded and understand the principles no matter what the latest technology fad is currently.
Theory will not change that much (if ever). NP complete problems, finate state automata, algorithm theory, compiler theory, discrete math, general testing and engineering principles, etc. Some of this stuff could be certifiable.
But we need some method of certification just like other professional organizations do, specially for code that affects human life (radiation machines, airtraffic control, military). The certification could be based on the theory and practices of our field, not current technology. This of course would be very difficult to do (such a test), but it's worth a try if we want to advance the field.
BTW
-Flame on ! Johnny Storm, Fanstatic 4.
Uh ... what ???
Resist the dark side !!! Oh man, why did they have to release it so soon ?????????? I feel like I know too much about the movie already, oh well, there should still be plenty of surprises ...
Darth Maul, Darth Vader, Ki Adi Mundi, Prince Xixor (from Dark Forces), a storm tropper and an Emperor's Royal Guardsman(my favorite, until Darth Maul).
:)
No way anybody is invading my office PC !!!
It's gone !!! ARGH! :(
I got one of the little ones, since the moron at Toys R us told me they didn't come out with the 12'' ones.