Babbage and the theory of computation
on
Babbage, A Look Back
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I wrote a report for a Philosophy of Mathematics class in college that may be relevant for this discussion. Babbage is commonly thought of as more of an engineer than a scientist. And his efforts were largely directed to building a mechanical device that exceeded the manufacturing capabilities of the day. As well, the immediate precursors to the Analytic Engine -- the Jacquard Loom and the Difference Engine -- were specialized for narrow, practical purposes.
However, if you examine his writings, you'll realize that he had lofty mathematical goals for the analytic engine. Specifically, he understood it to be an exercise in defining what moderns might call 'effective computability'. There's a striking similarity in his pursuit of this goal and the same explorations by Hilbert, Turing, Church, etc., in the twentieth cetury. At least that's what I argued in my paper.
I recommend his notebooks and the few existing biographies to those with a taste for the history of science and the biography of scientists.
PS: One other conclusion that I drew from my research was that the role of Ada Lovelace in developing the abstract principles of computer science has been highly overstated. She was probably mathematically adept. But she also lead an outrageous (for the time) life. The illegitimate, unmarried, and independently wealthy daughter of a Romantic poet. I suspect Mr. Babbage (Sir Charles?) entertained and amused her, both in his glum disposition and willingness to engage her intellectually. And we owe her a death for her record of and commentary on his actions. But I seriously doubt she originated the grand ideas commonly attributed to her.
Crucial bit of missing information of Babbage
on
Babbage, A Look Back
·
· Score: 2
As I understand it, Babbage absolutely despised street musicians. He tried to enact legislation banning them in London. Many knew of his efforts and would 'crank it up' when he passed by, adding to his torment.
There don't appear to be a lot of Lisp programming jobs out there right now.
When I've searched for Lisp jobs in the past, I've always found tens of hits on Monster. It is possible to get Lisp jobs in University towns and big cities across the country, and particularly easy on the coasts. What's cool is that people use Lisp to do cutting-edge stuff. These jobs are almost always challenging and your coworkers smart and intellectually-diverse cookies. You're not just surrounded by Perl monkeys.
Note also that Douglas Hoftstadter is/was a Lisp fan. He devoted three columns to it, which can be found in his "Metamagical Themas". (Note that this is an old dialect.)
MACSYMA, the mathematical programming language. A lot of languages are based on Lisp's semantic model, so that understanding Lisp allows you to understand them. This is true of the rapidly-emerging R statistical language, the Curl language that was discussed on Slashdot recently, etc. I think that the internal representation of GCC is Lisp-based. Some have said that XML is basically a subset of the representational capabilities of Lisp. A development tool for Ninetendo games (Nichimen?) is Lisp based. I think that one of Adobe's web-creation programs is Lisp-based or was in its first version (i.e., because of Lisp's rapid prototyping capabilities). One of Autocad's competitors is, I believe, also written in Lisp. Many expert system authoring tools. Etc etc. (Any errors in the above unintentional.)
Lisp tends to lurk behind the scenes, the competitive advantage that company's don't want you to know they're using to run circles around you. Paul Graham talks about this on his website.
It seems to me that Lisp would be useful in areas such as derivatives ananlysis, where people come up with a new exotic type of option every day. I'm still learning about Lisp, but it seems that it might provide more flexibility to handle this constant evolution.
Here are two reasons to use Common Lisp:
(1) It's numeric facilities are among the best thought-out of all programming languages, certainly better than those in more mainstream languages. For example, for decades Common Lisp programmers have not worried about integer overflows. Machine-sized integers are extended automatically to 'big integers' and contracted back as needed. Thus, one can compute efficiently and safely with integers in Common Lisp as a mathematical abstraction, regardless of their size. Contrast this with the bifurcated integer types of Java.
(2) Many of the major mathematical programming languages (e.g., MACSYMA) are Lisp-based. Emerging statistics packages such as R derive their semantics from the Scheme variant of the Lisp family. Lisp has proven capable of scaling up for the most demanding mathematical applications. This bodes well for its application in your area.
Does the relative absence of a good, free LISP interpreter for Windows ever give you pause?
People stopped using Lisp interpreters decades ago. Everything's compiled now, and has been for a while. In fact, Common Lisp implementations led the way in the arena of incremental compilation, e.g., Macintosh Common Lisp has had this capability for over a decade, even on hardware of trivial power compared to what we have now.
Franz and Xanalysis have free trial versions of their Windows environments. CLISP works under Windows. For an amazingly cheap native Windows Common Lisp, check out Corman Common Lisp.
As we move closer to having infinite memory and infinite processor speed do you see Lisp being used more in the mainstream?
Common Lisp applications of nontrivial size (i.e., NOT "hello world") are no larger than, and typically smaller than equivalents written in more mainstream languages (e.g., C++ and Java). This is sometimes obscured by the fact that programs in more mainstream languages have small disk footprints but large memory footprints due to large, dynamically-linked libraries. Common Lisp applications typically 'carry' all of this in the application image itself.
Round about the time average computers started sporting 8 megs of RAM, the memory demands of Common Lisp and more mainstream languages reached equilibrium. At this point, the last hangers-on ditched their workstations and joined other developers on PCs.
This is the same reasearch that Hemos recently posted about.
This is not surprising. Longtime readers of Slashdot know that Hemos routinely nails all of Nobel prize winners in a given year. The only drama was whether the Bose-Einstein guys would beat the particle accelerator guys and 'Young Einstein' himself Yahoo Serious for the physics prize.
perhaps you meant: it's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the dog.
Brer_rabbit, you may appreciate this variant: It's not the size of the wand that produces a rabbit in the hat, but the magic of man wielding it.
if (! sizeof(dog_in_fight) )
sizeof(fight_in_dog);
As a (Common) Lisper, I'm thinking:
(if (not (size (dog-in fight)))
(size (fight-in dog)))
I am of two minds on the events of the past few days.
You nicely expressed one of them. From the perspective of the Palestinians, we are the greatest friend of their greatest enemy. Our actions for decades have led, indirectly, to their misery. I understand why some of them are rejoicing over our loss. We are finally tasting our own medicine, in their eyes. Iraqui civilians have even more reason to hate us. They have gone from our ally (when we used them against Iran) to our enemy. Moreover, our sanctions have hurt them while their leaders have, predictably, survived just fine. Think about our reason for imposing sanctions: Make the innocent civilians of Iraq suffer enough that they change their government's stance towards the West. This is almost exactly the same logic the terrorists used against us in New York and Washington: Make the civilians of the US suffer enough that they chnage their government's stance towards the Arab world.
As I said, I am of two minds on recent events. The second position I find myself drawn to is one of military action. Not against any particular country -- there are too many harboring terrorists for us to take on. And not just Afghanistan. Remember, these are the people who defeated the Russians using the same guerilla tactics that defeated us in Vietnam. No, I think the appropriate military action would be to establish a multicountry anti-terrorist military group. It is acceptable if it is initially heavily Western or NATO-based, with Russia and China thrown in for credibility. This group would have the authority to violate the sovereignty of any country in the pursuit of terrorists that it had identified. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. If it had to mobilize 10,000 men in Afghanistan to shut down a training camp and 15,000 men in Egypt to do the same, then it would just do it without seeking these country's permission beforehand. No stalling, no tip-offs -- nothing to stand in the way.
I know this is a bit irrational, and I'll probably feel differently in two weeks. I just thought I'd throw it out there for others to consider.
In addition to Timothy's link, Akamai's web site contains the following message:
Caryn Brownell
Media Relations
Akamai Technologies
617-444-4661
cbrownell@akamai.com
AKAMAI TECHNOLOGIES MOURNS THE LOSS OF CO-FOUNDER AND CTO DANIEL LEWIN
Cambridge, MA, September 11, 2001 - With great sadness, Akamai Technologies, Inc. today announced the passing of Daniel C. Lewin, co-founder, chief technology officer and board member of the Company. American Airlines confirmed that he was on board the Boston to Los Angeles flight that crashed in New York City today. Danny was 31 years old and is survived by his wife and two sons.
George H. Conrades, chairman and chief executive officer of Akamai said, "Danny was a wonderful human being. He will be deeply missed by his many friends at Akamai. Our thoughts and prayers are with Danny's family, friends and colleagues during this time of national tragedy and personal loss."
Hmmm... Think about the racial paranoia that is going to stem from this tragic event.
A group has already been selected, pretty much by default and with no actual basis in fact (yet). People of Middle Eastern background.
I was born in Chicago but am of Asian Indian descent.
I remember how Arabic people were hassled during the Iran hostage crisis. I was in 4th grade then. My dad explained how the US supported the Shah, and how when he was deposed, his Iranian supporters were also forced to leave. We were pretty poor and lived in a crappy apartment complex in south Chicago. Two such Iranian families moved in during the crisis, each with little girls a few years younger than I was. They were harassed mercilessly at school -- the students did not understand that they were "on our side", so to speak.
I was a college student travelling Europe with a white friend when the World Trade Center was bombed a decade or so ago. We were pretty grubby as we went through customs at JFK airport in New York City upon our return. I was "randomly" picked out of line and directed to a secure area for detailed searching of my luggage. I noticed the other folks in the area were all of Middle Eastern or Indian descent. They had been "randomly" selected as well. I explained to the customs official that there was no need to search me, that I was natural-born US citizen, and flashed my passport. To no avail. By the time they finished with me, I had missed my connecting flight.
I remember the hysteria in the first two days following the Oklahoma City bombing, the automatic susipicion that the terrorists were Arabs. But this died down quickly.
I too worry that Arabs, even US citizens of Arab descent, will suffer in the aftermath of this tragedy. I'm not a member of that group, and have only experienced what I've detailed above, which is no big deal. I think it's important that we treat these people in the US fairly. This seems obvious as I write it, but maybe it's not.
On the other hand, the scale of this tragedy might change things altogether. The number of people that died at Oklahoma City is comparable to the number that die when a large commerical airliner go down. We can comprehend such numbers. But 10,000 people or more may have died today. That's 20% of the number of soldiers we lost in the Vietnam War, if my memory is correct. The average US citizen may not respond to this terrorist action as they have to those in times past.
The problem is that Education is a soft science, and actually does not have a practical scientific base.
It doesn't have to be. There are modern educational theories that build on work in cognitive psychology -- the scientific study of how we think. Now psychology is a social science, and therefore not as solid as the physical sciences. (Don't flame me too badly on this -- I have an undergrad degree from a technical school and am doing a Ph.D in cognitive psychology, and thus feel affinity for both the physical and social sciences.)
Cognitive psychology is in many ways the most scientific of the social sciences, with a large empirical literature of reproducible laboratory results, some impressive theories, and a growing record of application to problems like Human-Computer Interaction and, well, education.
So there is reason to have hope for the future of education if you think that its fundamental problem is the lack of a scientific foundation. For more on the interface between education and the other disciplines, do a search on "Learning Sciences".
I must say that I'm little impressed with these XML folks. Markup -- bid deal. It's been around for decades in various forms. The question is: Which tags, exactly? HumanML? Give me a friggin' break. The AI guys have been making such ontologies for decades. It works, but only to a degree. You can't pre-tag everything because the tags you have now aren't quite right and the tags you don't have...well, you don't have them yet! That's why this article deserves a big YAWN.
And if this is just a bunch of programmers with no input from psychologists, anthropologists, etc., it's simply doomed to be obvious, groundless, and thus useless.
When I do this, some people think it's because I want my ego to be fed. Of course, it's not like I'm asking you to call it Stallmanix.
Nice try. This must be a forgery.
It's a bit too glib, see?
Does the $1200 price include rust-proofing?
on
$1200 Cheap!
·
· Score: 2
Because you really need rust-proofing applied by the retail middle-man.
And floor mats. And pinstripes for $100 each. And accidental death and dismemberment insurance. And an 8-track.
$1200 sounds like quite a good deal when you add in all of these essentials. So quit complaining.
Why Katz is largely unloved on Slashdot
on
Seanbaby.com
·
· Score: 3, Troll
If there's a single trait most people who read Slashdot share -- maybe the only one besides an addiction to software -- it's a love of popular culture.
Actually, I don't think this is true, and this is why Katz catches so much flack around here.
Katz is not a techie, but rather a fan of tech/popular culture. Most folks come here for tech news, not cultural news. When the two intersect, as when a computer-animated movie is released, Katz invariably emphasizes 'the stuff cultural theorists care about' and de-emphasizes or fails to understand the stuff techies care about -- and gets flamed for it.
I tried to pick books that (1) no one has yet mentiond, (2) have stood and will stand the test of time, and (3) have some chance of being generally accessible.
Frankly, I'm shocked by some of the schlocky faddish crap that other's have recommended. Maybe this just means I'm old.
Jensen and Wirth's "Pascal: User Manual and Report" is a must for any library, general or University.
David Harel's "Algorithmics: The Spirit of Computing" is an introduction to the heart of computer science for the smart high school student. Would change a few lives if present in more public libraries.
Flake's "The Computational Beauty of Nature" is a good survey, for the smart high scool student or collegian, of the application of computing to modeling the natural world. Covers genetic algorithms, neural network, chaos, fractals, etc., in an introductory yet non-condescending manner.
For the budding AI mind: Haugeland's "Mind Design" introduces the philosophical side. Minsky's "Society of Mind" is accesible to the lay reader. Hofstadter's "Metamagical Themas" and "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies" are similarly comprehensible. All of these books are tremendously stimulating to the novice and expert alike.
(A personal plug: As a high school student I turned to AI after reading an early history of the field, McCorduck's "Machines Who Think", and a book by someone I now know to be a bit of a charlatan but who I still love: de Bono's "Mechanism of Mind")
Simon's "Science of the Artificial is absolutely foundational to AI, computer science, and design.
Paul Graham's "On Lisp". Presents those techniques that are effortless in Lisp and laborious in other languages. In the same vein, Kiczales et. al.'s "The Art of the Metaobject Protocol". (Okay, these are esoteric.)
Why would you want an architecture book in the computer section?
A compromise, then. Richard P. Gabriel's "Patterns of Software: Tales from the Software Community" does justice to both patterns in the computer programming sense and to Alexander's work. Readers will be inspired to track down Alexander's "Timeless Way of Building" or Grabow's biography of Alexander, both in the architecture section. They'll also be turned onto the software sense of the term. Finally, they'll get a book that belongs in a public library, not the elite shelves of a University's technical library.
Slashdot Mirror
I wrote a report for a Philosophy of Mathematics class in college that may be relevant for this discussion. Babbage is commonly thought of as more of an engineer than a scientist. And his efforts were largely directed to building a mechanical device that exceeded the manufacturing capabilities of the day. As well, the immediate precursors to the Analytic Engine -- the Jacquard Loom and the Difference Engine -- were specialized for narrow, practical purposes.
However, if you examine his writings, you'll realize that he had lofty mathematical goals for the analytic engine. Specifically, he understood it to be an exercise in defining what moderns might call 'effective computability'. There's a striking similarity in his pursuit of this goal and the same explorations by Hilbert, Turing, Church, etc., in the twentieth cetury. At least that's what I argued in my paper.
I recommend his notebooks and the few existing biographies to those with a taste for the history of science and the biography of scientists.
PS: One other conclusion that I drew from my research was that the role of Ada Lovelace in developing the abstract principles of computer science has been highly overstated. She was probably mathematically adept. But she also lead an outrageous (for the time) life. The illegitimate, unmarried, and independently wealthy daughter of a Romantic poet. I suspect Mr. Babbage (Sir Charles?) entertained and amused her, both in his glum disposition and willingness to engage her intellectually. And we owe her a death for her record of and commentary on his actions. But I seriously doubt she originated the grand ideas commonly attributed to her.
As I understand it, Babbage absolutely despised street musicians. He tried to enact legislation banning them in London. Many knew of his efforts and would 'crank it up' when he passed by, adding to his torment.
...I hate how they advertise their product with all those pop-under ads.
Yes, but you'll need the 80 column card with the extra 16K of RAM if you want a satisfying user experience.
-- Steve
With sufficiently small and unredundant objects such as your penis, further compression is impossible.
Can anybody clue me in on what relevant patents HP or Apple has, anyway?
I believe they have a patent on the trash can icon.
There don't appear to be a lot of Lisp programming jobs out there right now.
When I've searched for Lisp jobs in the past, I've always found tens of hits on Monster. It is possible to get Lisp jobs in University towns and big cities across the country, and particularly easy on the coasts. What's cool is that people use Lisp to do cutting-edge stuff. These jobs are almost always challenging and your coworkers smart and intellectually-diverse cookies. You're not just surrounded by Perl monkeys.
Note also that Douglas Hoftstadter is/was a Lisp fan. He devoted three columns to it, which can be found in his "Metamagical Themas". (Note that this is an old dialect.)
MACSYMA, the mathematical programming language. A lot of languages are based on Lisp's semantic model, so that understanding Lisp allows you to understand them. This is true of the rapidly-emerging R statistical language, the Curl language that was discussed on Slashdot recently, etc. I think that the internal representation of GCC is Lisp-based. Some have said that XML is basically a subset of the representational capabilities of Lisp. A development tool for Ninetendo games (Nichimen?) is Lisp based. I think that one of Adobe's web-creation programs is Lisp-based or was in its first version (i.e., because of Lisp's rapid prototyping capabilities). One of Autocad's competitors is, I believe, also written in Lisp. Many expert system authoring tools. Etc etc. (Any errors in the above unintentional.)
Lisp tends to lurk behind the scenes, the competitive advantage that company's don't want you to know they're using to run circles around you. Paul Graham talks about this on his website.
It seems to me that Lisp would be useful in areas such as derivatives ananlysis, where people come up with a new exotic type of option every day. I'm still learning about Lisp, but it seems that it might provide more flexibility to handle this constant evolution.
Here are two reasons to use Common Lisp:
(1) It's numeric facilities are among the best thought-out of all programming languages, certainly better than those in more mainstream languages. For example, for decades Common Lisp programmers have not worried about integer overflows. Machine-sized integers are extended automatically to 'big integers' and contracted back as needed. Thus, one can compute efficiently and safely with integers in Common Lisp as a mathematical abstraction, regardless of their size. Contrast this with the bifurcated integer types of Java.
(2) Many of the major mathematical programming languages (e.g., MACSYMA) are Lisp-based. Emerging statistics packages such as R derive their semantics from the Scheme variant of the Lisp family. Lisp has proven capable of scaling up for the most demanding mathematical applications. This bodes well for its application in your area.
Does the relative absence of a good, free LISP interpreter for Windows ever give you pause?
People stopped using Lisp interpreters decades ago. Everything's compiled now, and has been for a while. In fact, Common Lisp implementations led the way in the arena of incremental compilation, e.g., Macintosh Common Lisp has had this capability for over a decade, even on hardware of trivial power compared to what we have now.
Franz and Xanalysis have free trial versions of their Windows environments. CLISP works under Windows. For an amazingly cheap native Windows Common Lisp, check out Corman Common Lisp.
As we move closer to having infinite memory and infinite processor speed do you see Lisp being used more in the mainstream?
Common Lisp applications of nontrivial size (i.e., NOT "hello world") are no larger than, and typically smaller than equivalents written in more mainstream languages (e.g., C++ and Java). This is sometimes obscured by the fact that programs in more mainstream languages have small disk footprints but large memory footprints due to large, dynamically-linked libraries. Common Lisp applications typically 'carry' all of this in the application image itself.
Round about the time average computers started sporting 8 megs of RAM, the memory demands of Common Lisp and more mainstream languages reached equilibrium. At this point, the last hangers-on ditched their workstations and joined other developers on PCs.
This is the same reasearch that Hemos recently posted about.
This is not surprising. Longtime readers of Slashdot know that Hemos routinely nails all of Nobel prize winners in a given year. The only drama was whether the Bose-Einstein guys would beat the particle accelerator guys and 'Young Einstein' himself Yahoo Serious for the physics prize.
perhaps you meant: it's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the dog.
Brer_rabbit, you may appreciate this variant: It's not the size of the wand that produces a rabbit in the hat, but the magic of man wielding it.
if (! sizeof(dog_in_fight) )
sizeof(fight_in_dog);
As a (Common) Lisper, I'm thinking:
(if (not (size (dog-in fight)))
(size (fight-in dog)))
or:
(when (not (size (dog-in fight)))
(size (fight-in dog)))
or finally:
(unless (size (dog-in fight))
(size (fight-in dog)))
...it's not the size of the pipe that matters but its speed.
I am of two minds on the events of the past few days.
You nicely expressed one of them. From the perspective of the Palestinians, we are the greatest friend of their greatest enemy. Our actions for decades have led, indirectly, to their misery. I understand why some of them are rejoicing over our loss. We are finally tasting our own medicine, in their eyes. Iraqui civilians have even more reason to hate us. They have gone from our ally (when we used them against Iran) to our enemy. Moreover, our sanctions have hurt them while their leaders have, predictably, survived just fine. Think about our reason for imposing sanctions: Make the innocent civilians of Iraq suffer enough that they change their government's stance towards the West. This is almost exactly the same logic the terrorists used against us in New York and Washington: Make the civilians of the US suffer enough that they chnage their government's stance towards the Arab world.
As I said, I am of two minds on recent events. The second position I find myself drawn to is one of military action. Not against any particular country -- there are too many harboring terrorists for us to take on. And not just Afghanistan. Remember, these are the people who defeated the Russians using the same guerilla tactics that defeated us in Vietnam. No, I think the appropriate military action would be to establish a multicountry anti-terrorist military group. It is acceptable if it is initially heavily Western or NATO-based, with Russia and China thrown in for credibility. This group would have the authority to violate the sovereignty of any country in the pursuit of terrorists that it had identified. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. If it had to mobilize 10,000 men in Afghanistan to shut down a training camp and 15,000 men in Egypt to do the same, then it would just do it without seeking these country's permission beforehand. No stalling, no tip-offs -- nothing to stand in the way.
I know this is a bit irrational, and I'll probably feel differently in two weeks. I just thought I'd throw it out there for others to consider.
I copied this from here.
Hmmm... Think about the racial paranoia that is going to stem from this tragic event.
A group has already been selected, pretty much by default and with no actual basis in fact (yet). People of Middle Eastern background.
I was born in Chicago but am of Asian Indian descent.
I remember how Arabic people were hassled during the Iran hostage crisis. I was in 4th grade then. My dad explained how the US supported the Shah, and how when he was deposed, his Iranian supporters were also forced to leave. We were pretty poor and lived in a crappy apartment complex in south Chicago. Two such Iranian families moved in during the crisis, each with little girls a few years younger than I was. They were harassed mercilessly at school -- the students did not understand that they were "on our side", so to speak.
I was a college student travelling Europe with a white friend when the World Trade Center was bombed a decade or so ago. We were pretty grubby as we went through customs at JFK airport in New York City upon our return. I was "randomly" picked out of line and directed to a secure area for detailed searching of my luggage. I noticed the other folks in the area were all of Middle Eastern or Indian descent. They had been "randomly" selected as well. I explained to the customs official that there was no need to search me, that I was natural-born US citizen, and flashed my passport. To no avail. By the time they finished with me, I had missed my connecting flight.
I remember the hysteria in the first two days following the Oklahoma City bombing, the automatic susipicion that the terrorists were Arabs. But this died down quickly.
I too worry that Arabs, even US citizens of Arab descent, will suffer in the aftermath of this tragedy. I'm not a member of that group, and have only experienced what I've detailed above, which is no big deal. I think it's important that we treat these people in the US fairly. This seems obvious as I write it, but maybe it's not.
On the other hand, the scale of this tragedy might change things altogether. The number of people that died at Oklahoma City is comparable to the number that die when a large commerical airliner go down. We can comprehend such numbers. But 10,000 people or more may have died today. That's 20% of the number of soldiers we lost in the Vietnam War, if my memory is correct. The average US citizen may not respond to this terrorist action as they have to those in times past.
The problem is that Education is a soft science, and actually does not have a practical scientific base.
It doesn't have to be. There are modern educational theories that build on work in cognitive psychology -- the scientific study of how we think. Now psychology is a social science, and therefore not as solid as the physical sciences. (Don't flame me too badly on this -- I have an undergrad degree from a technical school and am doing a Ph.D in cognitive psychology, and thus feel affinity for both the physical and social sciences.)
Cognitive psychology is in many ways the most scientific of the social sciences, with a large empirical literature of reproducible laboratory results, some impressive theories, and a growing record of application to problems like Human-Computer Interaction and, well, education.
So there is reason to have hope for the future of education if you think that its fundamental problem is the lack of a scientific foundation. For more on the interface between education and the other disciplines, do a search on "Learning Sciences".
I must say that I'm little impressed with these XML folks. Markup -- bid deal. It's been around for decades in various forms. The question is: Which tags, exactly? HumanML? Give me a friggin' break. The AI guys have been making such ontologies for decades. It works, but only to a degree. You can't pre-tag everything because the tags you have now aren't quite right and the tags you don't have...well, you don't have them yet! That's why this article deserves a big YAWN.
And if this is just a bunch of programmers with no input from psychologists, anthropologists, etc., it's simply doomed to be obvious, groundless, and thus useless.
When I do this, some people think it's because I want my ego to be fed. Of course, it's not like I'm asking you to call it Stallmanix.
Nice try. This must be a forgery.
It's a bit too glib, see?
Because you really need rust-proofing applied by the retail middle-man.
And floor mats. And pinstripes for $100 each. And accidental death and dismemberment insurance. And an 8-track.
$1200 sounds like quite a good deal when you add in all of these essentials. So quit complaining.
If there's a single trait most people who read Slashdot share -- maybe the only one besides an addiction to software -- it's a love of popular culture.
Actually, I don't think this is true, and this is why Katz catches so much flack around here.
Katz is not a techie, but rather a fan of tech/popular culture. Most folks come here for tech news, not cultural news. When the two intersect, as when a computer-animated movie is released, Katz invariably emphasizes 'the stuff cultural theorists care about' and de-emphasizes or fails to understand the stuff techies care about -- and gets flamed for it.
I tried to pick books that (1) no one has yet mentiond, (2) have stood and will stand the test of time, and (3) have some chance of being generally accessible.
Frankly, I'm shocked by some of the schlocky faddish crap that other's have recommended. Maybe this just means I'm old.
Jensen and Wirth's "Pascal: User Manual and Report" is a must for any library, general or University.
David Harel's "Algorithmics: The Spirit of Computing" is an introduction to the heart of computer science for the smart high school student. Would change a few lives if present in more public libraries.
Flake's "The Computational Beauty of Nature" is a good survey, for the smart high scool student or collegian, of the application of computing to modeling the natural world. Covers genetic algorithms, neural network, chaos, fractals, etc., in an introductory yet non-condescending manner.
For the budding AI mind: Haugeland's "Mind Design" introduces the philosophical side. Minsky's "Society of Mind" is accesible to the lay reader. Hofstadter's "Metamagical Themas" and "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies" are similarly comprehensible. All of these books are tremendously stimulating to the novice and expert alike.
(A personal plug: As a high school student I turned to AI after reading an early history of the field, McCorduck's "Machines Who Think", and a book by someone I now know to be a bit of a charlatan but who I still love: de Bono's "Mechanism of Mind")
Simon's "Science of the Artificial is absolutely foundational to AI, computer science, and design.
Paul Graham's "On Lisp". Presents those techniques that are effortless in Lisp and laborious in other languages. In the same vein, Kiczales et. al.'s "The Art of the Metaobject Protocol". (Okay, these are esoteric.)
Why would you want an architecture book in the computer section?
A compromise, then. Richard P. Gabriel's "Patterns of Software: Tales from the Software Community" does justice to both patterns in the computer programming sense and to Alexander's work. Readers will be inspired to track down Alexander's "Timeless Way of Building" or Grabow's biography of Alexander, both in the architecture section. They'll also be turned onto the software sense of the term. Finally, they'll get a book that belongs in a public library, not the elite shelves of a University's technical library.
(The exposure to Lisp is a freebie!)