If you learn the right habits and style, it won't matter what language you learn.
But that's IF you learn the right habits and style.
Personally, I'd recommend you start with the text "How to Design Programs." You can buy it, or you can read it for free online. It is specifically written to be usable at the high school level (though it is also used at the college level).
See: http://www.htdp.org/
(and the development environment for it is:) http://www.drscheme.org/
After you've finished, go back and learn C/C++. You'll have to adapt to some new concepts (such as manual memory management) but you'll have the basic methodology down.
Even Isaac Newton, another paranoic genius who may have geneuine invented many ideas ex-nihlo said "If I've have seen further, it is because I've stood on the shoulder of giants."
You need to read Gleick's biography of Newton. He makes a very compelling case that when Newton wrote that, he was just kissing ass (it was in a private letter) and that he had absolutely no respect to the "giant" he was addressing it to.
Re:Oh the humanity.......
on
Isn't It Ironic?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The first definition given here was taken from the American Heritage dictionary.
Here's the relevant quote from that:
Usage Note: The word forte, coming from French fort, should properly be pronounced with one syllable, like the English word fort. Common usage, however, prefers the two-syllable pronunciation, (fôrt), which has been influenced possibly by the music term forte borrowed from Italian. In a recent survey a strong majority of the Usage Panel, 74 percent, preferred the two-syllable pronunciation. The result is a delicate situation; speakers who are aware of the origin of the word may wish to continue to pronounce it as one syllable but at an increasing risk of puzzling their listeners.
"Simulations are doomed to succeed" -Rodney Brooks
Building a simulation environment by hand requires filtering out some detail from the concrete environment you're attempting to abstract. Often once one has selected such a filter, the resulting robot will perform almost perfectly in the simulated environment, and yet fail miserably once shifted into the real world environment.
I invite you to enter the above quote (along with brooks' name) into google and read some of the work that pops up.
Having said that, this sort of thing only matters when you care about computers exhibiting "real world intelligence." For me, the problem domain is already abstract mathematics (or at least program analysis), so I don't need to worry about physics, just NP-Hardness. So AI could still make progress here without needing to mess with solder.
George Orwell could have included elections in "1984." It wouldn't have mattered; the Party Members were rabid supporters of Big Brother, and he would have won by a land-slide.
I'm not claiming that we live in Orwell's world (after all, by any account the 2000 election was divided down the middle, not a land slide for anyone). But sometimes when I read some webpages (e.g. the little green footballs blog), I wonder how far we are from having our own "Hate Weeks"...
"You are prepared to give your lives?" "Yes." "You are prepared to commit murder?" "Yes." "To commit acts of sabotage which may cause the death of hundreds of innocent people?" "Yes." "To betray your country to foreign powers?" "Yes." "You are prepared to cheat, to forge, to blackmail, to corrupt the minds of children, to distribute habit forming drugs, to encourage prostitution, to disseminate venereal diseases-to do anything which is likely to cause demoralization and weaken the power of the Party?" "Yes." "If for example, if would somehow serve our interests to throw sulphuric acid in a child's face-are you prepared to do that?" "Yes."
1984, pg 142.
Freedom from tyranny will not come from hate nor evil. Winston was not a paragon of purity. I don't think enough people recognize that.
I just donated yesterday (in response to a comment in the FSF award/. story), and Ton says in his email reply to me:
"PS: with this amount the meter will go through the 100k today.:-)"
So do I qualify for the T-shirt? I mean, this doesn't mean I was the last straw, so to speak, just that Ton could tell from the stack of pending donations for the day that they WOULD reach 100K...
The other thing is that there cannot be a MOVE instruction. Memory can be exchanged with a register value, but not copied
One point; the issue with MOVEs is not the fact that you are reading a value in the source register, but rather that you are destroying the value stored in the destination register.
Now, perhaps you intended that interpretation of the word "copied". But when I think of the word "copy", I normally associated it with the reading of the old stuff, not with destroying the new stuff.
Who cares what time it was submitted? The
category is "redundant", not "copied from another post"
In other words, redundant should be applied if the information content of a comment is a subset of another comment.
Now, if you had mentioned the fact that the above comment actually is NOT redundant by this definition (since it includes a link to the SGI STL library), then you would have been making a valid argument.
>> Irony is, most commonly, "incongruity between
>> the actual result of a sequence of events and
>> the normal or expected result".
>
> Lets use your definition, why don't we.
[SNIP]
I think you are confusing "expected" (as in, average or mean value) with "desired" (as in, dreamed or wished)
Are you asserting that if our government cuts off funds for this research, then no one in the world is ever going to make inroads along these lines?
Or are you merely stating that the government should take a hand in what people it funds, in terms of restricting the nationalities of whom these research facilities employ?
Or are you requesting that these sorts of discoveries not be publicized in the media, for fear of researchers being kidnapped by enemy nations, so that their discoveries can be used for destructive goals?
In any case, all new technologies are bound to have evil potential purposes to match the good ones. I feel that ignorance is never the right answer. I don't know when "temperance of discovery/research" crosses into hiding from the truth...
Hmmm. I'm a dashing young computer geek (using GNOME to read/., no less).
I'm also an Mac-using artist (FD Painter is too good to give up)...
I guess this movie will be the perfect date flick for me and my hand!
Re:This is an incorrect definition of NP
on
Does P = NP?
·
· Score: 1
Your argument that humans are as powerful as turing machines hinges on one thing that I'm not certain you can prove:
we need an infinite tape to put data onto.
As far as I know, I do not have an infinite tape going through my body. One could argue that the universe is our infinite tape, I suppose, but that relies on the assumption that the universe is infinite.
I in fact might argue that we are no more powerful than DFAs. Very large, very convoluted DFAs, but still DFAs. That is a statement that I can be sure of.
tick tock, blah blah, etc. Somebody's learned how to check the "Post Anonymously" box. I could write down guesses as to who this AC is, but I won't.
i AM intent on adding content to this thread, so here's something that I've realized since I wrote that original comment: my real problem with Basic is that its a crappy language for describing ABSTRACTIONS. Automatically C, Java, Logo, or Scheme become better choices just in terms of long-term lesssons the students learn.
(props to Bob Markowicz at Glastonbury HS for that one!!!!!)
Looking back at my experience in that Computer Programming course (i'm a GHS grad), I can't decide whether I'd say that it was great or terrible. After my first year in course 6 (Computer Science), I felt like that high school class had been a total waste compared to what I learned about in such a short time in college.
But now its several years after freshman year, and I've spent some time teaching students myself. Personally, I've come to realize how limited a teacher is in terms of what he or she can do in a class, and I can only imagine how much worse it is for a high school teacher.
My advice to the teacher who asked the original question: you could try to teach more about the structure of the machine underneath. The class where I learned about Finite State Machines, Datapaths, Pipelining, etc, was one of the best classes I've had. Applying those concepts to designing my own implementation of a risc processor was amazing.
I don't know if its realistic to try to provide such lessons at the high school level, but I think it would have been cool to learn more about in high school.
Another cool thing that I think I would have liked to have been shown in High School is how the same information (ie data structures like Lists, Graphs, Sets, etc) can be represented in so many different ways, and how those representations affect the performance of the code you write to do operations on that abstract structure. But again, that might be way far beyond high school.
city streets are not components in the cannonical sense of the word. But any modern city street is designed much like any other moden city street, albeit with small customizations to help it work the way it needs to
Kind of like "Patterns" in Software Engineering, no?
What he was saying in his essay was that there was no single technology that would lead to an order of magnitude improvement in programmer productivity. He sure as hell wasn't saying that better languages couldn't improve productivity. A language that doubled productivity wouldn't be a "silver bullet", by his definition. But so what? Doubling productivity is still an enormous improvement.
In base 2, doubling productivity is an order of magnitude.
I agree that doubling productivity is an enormous improvement. So enormous that I don't think that any single language is actually going to bring it about. Your "sheep" is a fictional beast, and while I'd like to believe that it could emerge in time, I'm not putting money on it ever happening.
Actually, I find 10 page proofs that 0 = 1 to be both informative AND interesting. After all, they usually demonstrate (quite forcibly) how fragile our own minds are when it comes to dealing with complex proofs.
Wait, I take that back. A 10 page proof that "0 = 1" written in a Computationally Verifiable Proof Language is neither Interesting (since documents written in those languages are rarely interesting for human eyes) nor Informative (since it wouldn't pass a Verifier). The only way such a proof COULD be Informative would be if it DID pass the Verifier, because then it would be exposing a bug in the program.
In any case, a proof that 0 = 1 written in the Style of our friend above can be a lot of fun to work one's way through, especially if it takes more than a few minutes to track down the source of the error in the proof.
You missed the point of the Captain Derivative's post.
Unix is not immune to viruses. Check out Communications of the ACM 32, 6 (June 1989) pages 678-687
The article dissects an Internet Worm from 1988 that spread across the Internet infecting Sun 3 and VAX machines running BSD 4.
The point that Captain Derivation is making is that Windows is the most popular platform at this point and therefore the ideal target for exploiting security flaws.
Yes, the flaws that exist there are braindead, but there are plenty of even less secure operating systems in existence; why not target them? Because it would be pointless, they aren't POPULAR.
Unix programs still have plenty of security flaws. They aren't targetted as much because there's less bang for the buck in doing that.
Somebody should write an emacs-style editor with advanced Tex-style formatting features and WYSIWYG support. It should be able to import DOC, RTF, WPD and other popular formats.
LyX is an editor with many of these features. I don't think it has much to offer in terms of Importing Files, but perhaps that would be a good direction to go in for it?
Wouldn't a logical way to workaround this problem be to run multiple Java applications using one JVM?
I believe I saw some Java application a while back that would start up the main() function of other classes, acting as a sort of shell for Java...
Of course, in doing this you lose isolation between your applications (which can be a problem if your application doesn't play nicely with other threads that are running in the current JVM) but still...
Formally proving that an implementation satisfies a specification is possible, but NOT TRIVIAL.
This, coupled with the fact that so few developers can handle writing formal specifications (can you see the average perl hacker writing a spec?), is why it's not "that simple"
Finally, as for your suggestion that everyone use VDM/Z or Larch/CLU, can you grab me a copy of MS Visual CLU? No? How about the CLU gcc front end? No? Well then how do you expect me to compile it? Yes, I know that compilers are available, but reliable ones with decent optimization passes? Even Barbara Liskov seems to have moved on from CLU...
Don't get me wrong, specification languages are definitely cool in the right places, but we've got a ways to go before they become palatable to the average human being
Slashdot Mirror
If you learn the right habits and style, it won't matter what language you learn.
But that's IF you learn the right habits and style.
Personally, I'd recommend you start with the text "How to Design Programs." You can buy it, or you can read it for free online. It is specifically written to be usable at the high school level (though it is also used at the college level).
See: http://www.htdp.org/
(and the development environment for it is:)
http://www.drscheme.org/
After you've finished, go back and learn C/C++. You'll have to adapt to some new concepts (such as manual memory management) but you'll have the basic methodology down.
You need to read Gleick's biography of Newton. He makes a very compelling case that when Newton wrote that, he was just kissing ass (it was in a private letter) and that he had absolutely no respect to the "giant" he was addressing it to.
Here's the relevant quote from that:
Languages evolve with usage. Deal with it.
"Simulations are doomed to succeed" -Rodney Brooks
Building a simulation environment by hand requires filtering out some detail from the concrete environment you're attempting to abstract. Often once one has selected such a filter, the resulting robot will perform almost perfectly in the simulated environment, and yet fail miserably once shifted into the real world environment.
I invite you to enter the above quote (along with brooks' name) into google and read some of the work that pops up.
Having said that, this sort of thing only matters when you care about computers exhibiting "real world intelligence." For me, the problem domain is already abstract mathematics (or at least program analysis), so I don't need to worry about physics, just NP-Hardness. So AI could still make progress here without needing to mess with solder.
you're missing the point.
George Orwell could have included elections in "1984." It wouldn't have mattered; the Party Members were rabid supporters of Big Brother, and he would have won by a land-slide.
I'm not claiming that we live in Orwell's world (after all, by any account the 2000 election was divided down the middle, not a land slide for anyone). But sometimes when I read some webpages (e.g. the little green footballs blog), I wonder how far we are from having our own "Hate Weeks"...
1984, pg 142.
Freedom from tyranny will not come from hate nor evil. Winston was not a paragon of purity. I don't think enough people recognize that.
Still, the book is amazingly relevant these days.
The article above is trying to save the Alpha processor.
While this page is trying to save Alpha Flight.
We obviously need to get Wolvie to do a guest appearance at HP. That will stir things up for sure.
I just donated yesterday (in response to a comment in the FSF award /. story), and Ton says in his email reply to me:
:-)"
"PS: with this amount the meter will go through the 100k today.
So do I qualify for the T-shirt? I mean, this doesn't mean I was the last straw, so to speak, just that Ton could tell from the stack of pending donations for the day that they WOULD reach 100K...
One point; the issue with MOVEs is not the fact that you are reading a value in the source register, but rather that you are destroying the value stored in the destination register.
Now, perhaps you intended that interpretation of the word "copied". But when I think of the word "copy", I normally associated it with the reading of the old stuff, not with destroying the new stuff.
I was agreeing with your conclusion.
Not the reasoning you used to reach it.
A key difference.
(I can't believe I'm replying to an A.C. That's really sad. I mean, who are "you" anyway...)
Who cares what time it was submitted? The
category is "redundant", not "copied from another post"
In other words, redundant should be applied if the information content of a comment is a subset of another comment.
Now, if you had mentioned the fact that the above comment actually is NOT redundant by this definition (since it includes a link to the SGI STL library), then you would have been making a valid argument.
>> Irony is, most commonly, "incongruity between
>> the actual result of a sequence of events and
>> the normal or expected result".
>
> Lets use your definition, why don't we.
[SNIP]
I think you are confusing "expected" (as in, average or mean value) with "desired" (as in, dreamed or wished)
I don't understand.
Are you asserting that if our government cuts off funds for this research, then no one in the world is ever going to make inroads along these lines?
Or are you merely stating that the government should take a hand in what people it funds, in terms of restricting the nationalities of whom these research facilities employ?
Or are you requesting that these sorts of discoveries not be publicized in the media, for fear of researchers being kidnapped by enemy nations, so that their discoveries can be used for destructive goals?
In any case, all new technologies are bound to have evil potential purposes to match the good ones. I feel that ignorance is never the right answer. I don't know when "temperance of discovery/research" crosses into hiding from the truth...
-Felix
Hmmm. I'm a dashing young computer geek (using GNOME to read /., no less).
...
I'm also an Mac-using artist (FD Painter is too good to give up)
I guess this movie will be the perfect date flick for me and my hand!
we need an infinite tape to put data onto.
As far as I know, I do not have an infinite tape going through my body. One could argue that the universe is our infinite tape, I suppose, but that relies on the assumption that the universe is infinite.
I in fact might argue that we are no more powerful than DFAs. Very large, very convoluted DFAs, but still DFAs. That is a statement that I can be sure of.
Yuo're right.
However, there are underrepresented parties that have ideals that are more inline with the desires of the people in here than not.
I'd say that a vote for Nader is probably a vote against the DMCA.
Perhaps Libertarian would work too.
Comments?
tick tock, blah blah, etc. Somebody's learned how to check the "Post Anonymously" box. I could write down guesses as to who this AC is, but I won't.
i AM intent on adding content to this thread, so here's something that I've realized since I wrote that original comment: my real problem with Basic is that its a crappy language for describing ABSTRACTIONS. Automatically C, Java, Logo, or Scheme become better choices just in terms of long-term lesssons the students learn.
okay, back to compiler implementation. woo woo.
(props to Bob Markowicz at Glastonbury HS for that one!!!!!)
Looking back at my experience in that Computer Programming course (i'm a GHS grad), I can't decide whether I'd say that it was great or terrible. After my first year in course 6 (Computer Science), I felt like that high school class had been a total waste compared to what I learned about in such a short time in college.
But now its several years after freshman year, and I've spent some time teaching students myself. Personally, I've come to realize how limited a teacher is in terms of what he or she can do in a class, and I can only imagine how much worse it is for a high school teacher.
My advice to the teacher who asked the original question: you could try to teach more about the structure of the machine underneath. The class where I learned about Finite State Machines, Datapaths, Pipelining, etc, was one of the best classes I've had. Applying those concepts to designing my own implementation of a risc processor was amazing.
I don't know if its realistic to try to provide such lessons at the high school level, but I think it would have been cool to learn more about in high school.
Another cool thing that I think I would have liked to have been shown in High School is how the same information (ie data structures like Lists, Graphs, Sets, etc) can be represented in so many different ways, and how those representations affect the performance of the code you write to do operations on that abstract structure. But again, that might be way far beyond high school.
city streets are not components in the cannonical sense of the word. But any modern city street is designed much like any other moden city street, albeit with small customizations to help it work the way it needs to
Kind of like "Patterns" in Software Engineering, no?
What he was saying in his essay was that there was no single technology that would lead to an order of magnitude improvement in programmer productivity. He sure as hell wasn't saying that better languages couldn't improve productivity. A language that doubled productivity wouldn't be a "silver bullet", by his definition. But so what? Doubling productivity is still an enormous improvement.
In base 2, doubling productivity is an order of magnitude.
I agree that doubling productivity is an enormous improvement. So enormous that I don't think that any single language is actually going to bring it about. Your "sheep" is a fictional beast, and while I'd like to believe that it could emerge in time, I'm not putting money on it ever happening.
Actually, I find 10 page proofs that 0 = 1 to be both informative AND interesting. After all, they usually demonstrate (quite forcibly) how fragile our own minds are when it comes to dealing with complex proofs.
Wait, I take that back. A 10 page proof that "0 = 1" written in a Computationally Verifiable Proof Language is neither Interesting (since documents written in those languages are rarely interesting for human eyes) nor Informative (since it wouldn't pass a Verifier). The only way such a proof COULD be Informative would be if it DID pass the Verifier, because then it would be exposing a bug in the program.
In any case, a proof that 0 = 1 written in the Style of our friend above can be a lot of fun to work one's way through, especially if it takes more than a few minutes to track down the source of the error in the proof.
You missed the point of the Captain Derivative's post.
Unix is not immune to viruses. Check out Communications of the ACM 32, 6 (June 1989) pages 678-687
The article dissects an Internet Worm from 1988 that spread across the Internet infecting Sun 3 and VAX machines running BSD 4.
The point that Captain Derivation is making is that Windows is the most popular platform at this point and therefore the ideal target for exploiting security flaws.
Yes, the flaws that exist there are braindead, but there are plenty of even less secure operating systems in existence; why not target them? Because it would be pointless, they aren't POPULAR.
Unix programs still have plenty of security flaws. They aren't targetted as much because there's less bang for the buck in doing that.
Somebody should write an emacs-style editor with advanced Tex-style formatting features and WYSIWYG support. It should be able to import DOC, RTF, WPD and other popular formats.
LyX is an editor with many of these features. I don't think it has much to offer in terms of Importing Files, but perhaps that would be a good direction to go in for it?
-Felix
Wouldn't a logical way to workaround this problem be to run multiple Java applications using one JVM?
I believe I saw some Java application a while back that would start up the main() function of other classes, acting as a sort of shell for Java...
Of course, in doing this you lose isolation between your applications (which can be a problem if your application doesn't play nicely with other threads that are running in the current JVM) but still...
-Felix
Formally proving that an implementation satisfies a specification is possible, but NOT TRIVIAL.
This, coupled with the fact that so few developers can handle writing formal specifications (can you see the average perl hacker writing a spec?), is why it's not "that simple"
Finally, as for your suggestion that everyone use VDM/Z or Larch/CLU, can you grab me a copy of MS Visual CLU? No? How about the CLU gcc front end? No? Well then how do you expect me to compile it? Yes, I know that compilers are available, but reliable ones with decent optimization passes? Even Barbara Liskov seems to have moved on from CLU...
Don't get me wrong, specification languages are definitely cool in the right places, but we've got a ways to go before they become palatable to the average human being