Don't worry too much about learning a particular language. If you understand the core principles of good programming practice, you will be able to readily take advantage of the feature set of almost any good language.
In this regard, I think the best book to learn and reinforce the fundamentals of computer science would be Abelson and Sussman's Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.
It uses the language called Scheme, which is a *very* slight variation of common lisp that is much simpler. Lisp is already a very simple language due to its regular syntax (sometimes thought of as "lack of syntax"), and yet it is wickedly powerful and succinct.
All this being said, if you *really* want to get the most mileage out of learning a particular language, learn C. It is the inspiration for the syntactic nuances of most new languages that have been created over the last 30 years. It has been the common-denominator-language that all software developers share.
If moving to a functional programming language breaks your algorithms, then you are somehow doing it wrong. That line doesn't even make sense to me. Algorithms are mathematical constructs that have nothing to do with programming paradigm. Assuming the language is Turing complete, how is that even possible?
For one thing, the implementation of your algorithms must change to compensate for the lack of destructive updates in the functional paradigm.
See "Purely Functional Data Structures" by Okasaki for more info.
In particular, your data structures must all become 'persistent' under the functional paradigm (as opposed to 'ephemeral' under an imperative implementation).
This means that, when you update a list or tree using the functional paradigm, you must create a copy of the original data structure that reflects the update, while keeping the original structure unchanged.
It sounds simple but in many cases this is not trivial.
For example, simple things like list concatenation, which in the imperative world can be done in O(1) time using pointers, is not so easily done under the functional paradigm. Concatenation of lists can only be achieved in O(1) *amortized* time using the functional paradigm and the Banker's Method, and this only after essentially representing the lists as trees and incorporating lazy evaluation in the algorithm design.
"And quite franky, I think there is a good reason why this is done with IT jobs more often: analytic and associative thinking and problem solving are not skills you can learn."
This is not true at all. In fact, the whole point of any good undergraduate program in Computer Science, Mathematics, or Engineering of any kind, is to teach exactly those things.
Wup dee F*$@in doo. My cat recognizes himself in a mirror. The real question is how much money was wasted trying to figure out if a magpie can recognize it's own reflection. Are people this retarded (or are the researchers behind this that desperate)? Are the people behind this really just former intelligent design zombies who are finally awakening to the fact that humans are animals too?
Linux is based on (even if it shares none of the code) Unix, which started 30+ years ago and never went away. Unix is not just an OS, it's a software development philosophy. Open source is another philosophy, and although it's tenets are independent from those of any particular piece of software/firmware, it makes a profound combination when applied to Unix. Sure, Linux may come and go (not likely) but you really want to bet safely, the Unix-like operating environment is not going anywhere.
As a resident of Massachusetts I don't think I'm alone in thinking that the headers to such documents should instead read "Common Ripoff". Other than Rhode Island I can't think of a more shady state legislature/crime syndicate. Of course, I could be wrong- if so I apologize to any Rhode-Island legislators.
Unix is an inflexible system? Let's see... it's totally modular (even more so in the case of Mach or the Hurd), Linux allows you to build literally any kind of system you want, and completely separates system from user processes to allow the kernel to be kept relatively small and tidy. Yup. That sounds *really* inflexible to me. Windows ties system and user processes together, ties the user to Microsoft programs for things as simple as text editing, has a registry system which invariably falls on it's face.. but it's flexible. That's really rich. Some Harvard MBA must've come up with this campaign.
Well, you ought to pick up a book on the subject, and this may be a bad explanation.
The general idea behind a functional language is that everything can be a function. In pure functional languages, you don't assign a value to anything, but rather functions provide values. That is, you run a literal through a function and examine (or use) the result. In most functional languages however, assignment is possible, and variables often take the value of a function.
One of the implications of anything being a function is that the value of a function is oftentimes a function, in which case you have a closure, named because by running a function on a particular value, you create a particular function based upon that value, i.e. you have closed around that value (the value is stored within the created function). Here it becomes apparent where functional languages got their name.
There are tons of other mechanisms to explore within functional languages, and like I said you should try to pick up a book on the subject. There are lots of good ones out there.
First, an interesting thing about this is that.NET really boils down to an XML parser/generator (or does it? the whole thing is a nebulus blur (surprise! another nebulous blur from the corporate world that is going to change the world!)) And XML is really just
S-expressions, which is really the whole basis if LISP. And all this time has to be spent retrofitting lisp to.NET? How well engineered can this thing be?
Having said that:
This is a great effort, and functional languages are my idol, but why spend all this energy trying to retro fit LISP to the.NET nebula? Why spend time trying to warp any good tool to fit the jacket created by one company?
.NET is just another intermediate language. Are we going to go through this every time company X comes out with an intermediate language?
Of course, this isn't just company X, it is Microsoft. And just the fact that this matters is spooky enough. But the question still stands nonetheless.
I might burn some Karma for saying this, but
Linux is symbolically a pawn, being used
by the giant corporations for leverage against their current giant corporation rivals
no doubt. when it comes to business, in America the big companies never do *anything* because it's better. They only do it to make money. That's how they get to be so big and correspondingly that's how their products achieve such an immense level of suckage.
CS deals with the thoeretical aspects of computation. As is often quoted here on/., Edsgar Dijkstra once pointed out that Computer Science is as much about computers as astronomy is about telescopes. Indeed, in your undergraduate curriculum at an accredited university, you will never take a required Computer Science course wherein the main goal is to learn how to program. Always there will be a theoretical end which is sought. In fact, I would say that Computer Science is simply a branch of mathematics which concerns itself with what is computable given a certain amount of time and a certain amount of space, and the classification of known problems via verification of reducibility of various sorts (look up the Cook-Levin Theorem).
Basically, Computer Science is way more enjoyable than learning how to deal with the fleeting technology of the moment, and I recommend it strongly if the search for universal truths is your bag.
P.S. If you just want to learn a language, learn LISP. It's a good one.
Computer Science is not programming! At the least it is the theory of what can be solved by programs given a certain amount of time and space. Beyond that, computer science is more like a subfield of mathematics, specialized in the design of algorithms and the abstracts of machines that can execute them, the design of programming languages and finally the effort to determine what problems are not computatble at all.
The building itself has a good chance of being a great success, despite the fact that so many resources will need to be concentrated in such a small area (food, water, fuel, medical supplies... the list goes on and on). The designers will probably take all this into consideration, and will hopefully leave lots of room for error through over-estimation.
But that's not the real problem here. This building is intended to solve a problem itself: the overflowing population in Shanghai. Sure, it will alleviate the scarcity of real estate for some people for some amount of time, but what about the future? Will we just keep building stuff like this to avoid the fact that our numbers grow exponentially? Any engineer is aware that an exponential function is not something you can work with beyond a certain threshold. i.e., you can't fight it by trying to accomodate the large values it produces- you have to find a way to change the situation producing the function to one that is more workable. This is the same kind of thing that computer scientists do when finding faster ways to compute things like matrix products etc.
My point is, by building this huge building to deal with the massive population of shanghai, we are just postponing the inevitable, and are not solving anything. How much is a project worth that doesn't actually solve anything? This is like using duct-tape to fix your car engine. We need to think of ways to limit the unchecked growth of our own population.
I love kids just as much as the next guy. Everybody loves kids. But we need to think about how many kids we can have and still ensure that they will all have a place to live (preferrably not a giant 300 story cage).
Just to point out that NP is actually a superset of the class P, the problems of which can be solved in polynomial time. These include some pretty simple problems (i.e. linear equations). So, to associate hardness with the class NP is not accurate by the definition. difficult != NP.
However, a *different* class of problems, those that are NP hard, are theoretically difficult in that any problem in NP can be polynomial-time reduced to them, even if the problem itself is not in NP. A subset of the class NP hard is the class of problems which are NP complete . If these problems had polynomial-time solutions, then all NP problems would also have polytime solutions.
Pardon my regurgitation of formal language thoery 101:)
This is perhaps the fifth article I've seen on slashdot which spawns a lot of hemming and hawing over what to study in school. I was a computer science major in college, and hence did not come into the working world with a lot of expertise in quantitative science. However, a good computer science undergraduate program, or any science program for that matter, will teach you how to *learn*. I am now working for a federally funded defense contractor on projects which happen to involve some physics, but this does not make me ill suited for the work. I have simply had to learn what I need to know for the project at hand, and in the meantime the skills I learned as an undergraduate have helped the project, without my having to focus on learning quality programming practices. The point is, it's not what you majored in in college. College is only there to show you how to learn more. You can do that as a graduate student, or as a professional. Either way, you have the ability to acquire the knowledge necessary to do a job in an efficient and effective manner.
This is perhaps the fifth article I've seen on slashdot which spawns a lot of hemming and hawing over what to study in school. I was a computer science major in college, and hence did not come into the working world with a lot of expertise in quantitative science. However, a good computer science undergraduate program, or any science program for that matter, will teach you how to *learn*. I am now working for a federally funded defense contractor on projects which happen to involve some physics, but this does not make me ill suited for the work. I have simply had to learn what I need to know for the project at hand, and in the meantime the skills I learned as an undergraduate have helped the project, without my having to focus on learning quality programming practices.
The point is, it's not what you majored in in college. College is only there to show you how to learn more. You can do that as a graduate student, or as a professional. Either way, you have the ability to acquire the knowledge necessary to do a job in an efficient and effective manner.
It is very true, and interesting no doubt, that the so-called script kiddies who think of themselves as thumbing their noses at authority are in fact most likely going to cause the unnecessary subversion of privacy in the long run. Cliff Stoll makes a similar point in the Cuckoo's Egg, saying that he wishes there were no need for a computer security market, and that there wouldn't be if people were more considerate in their use and acquisition of information. But at the same time, that's like asking all of the thieves and criminals in the world to stop what they are doing at once. There are always going to be a small percentage of mischievous people out there, and if there were no barriers in place to keep them out of the cookie jar, god knows the real damage they could do. Ultimately, the script kiddies are making it harder for the REAL bad ones, the ones who could start a war, for example. All we can hope is that the damage to our freedom and privacy is minimized in the process of preventing the inevitable criminal activity online.
uh, did I say anything about admiring anyone?
(and even if I did, doesn't admiration stem from a high regard for one's beliefs?) Sorry bro, think before you speak.
It would be interesting to see what Philip K.
Dick's reaction to these trying times of copyright infringement would be. Just from reading his essays I might imagine he would have embraced the current situation rather than spitting venom, if only because he would have wanted to do the opposite of what Harlan Ellison is doing. (come to think of it, didn't Ellison rip on PKD when he was alive over this same beef?)
If you study Computer Science rather than CIS, you may have to work harder, but you will also be happier. You may find that you can learn the CIS stuff too, but (and this is just my opinion) the math behind computer science is what makes it interesting. It is not represented well by courses like introductory calculus. It is typically discrete math, which is quite a different, and I think more rewarding, animal. Also, even if you end up with the same kind of job as a CIS graduate, you will have an edge, in that you will have had more difficult training and hence will be more prepared for whatever comes your way.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't worry too much about learning a particular language. If you understand the core principles of good programming practice, you will be able to readily take advantage of the feature set of almost any good language.
In this regard, I think the best book to learn and reinforce the fundamentals of computer science would be Abelson and Sussman's Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.
http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html
It uses the language called Scheme, which is a *very* slight variation of common lisp that is much simpler. Lisp is already a very simple language due to its regular syntax (sometimes thought of as "lack of syntax"), and yet it is wickedly powerful and succinct.
All this being said, if you *really* want to get the most mileage out of learning a particular language, learn C. It is the inspiration for the syntactic nuances of most new languages that have been created over the last 30 years. It has been the common-denominator-language that all software developers share.
When you move to FP, all your algorithms break
If moving to a functional programming language breaks your algorithms, then you are somehow doing it wrong. That line doesn't even make sense to me. Algorithms are mathematical constructs that have nothing to do with programming paradigm. Assuming the language is Turing complete, how is that even possible?
For one thing, the implementation of your algorithms must change to compensate for the lack of destructive updates in the functional paradigm.
See "Purely Functional Data Structures" by Okasaki for more info.
In particular, your data structures must all become 'persistent' under the functional paradigm (as opposed to 'ephemeral' under an imperative implementation).
This means that, when you update a list or tree using the functional paradigm, you must create a copy of the original data structure that reflects the update, while keeping the original structure unchanged.
It sounds simple but in many cases this is not trivial.
For example, simple things like list concatenation, which in the imperative world can be done in O(1) time using pointers, is not so easily done under the functional paradigm. Concatenation of lists can only be achieved in O(1) *amortized* time using the functional paradigm and the Banker's Method, and this only after essentially representing the lists as trees and incorporating lazy evaluation in the algorithm design.
"And quite franky, I think there is a good reason why this is done with IT jobs more often: analytic and associative thinking and problem solving are not skills you can learn."
This is not true at all. In fact, the whole point of any good undergraduate program in Computer Science, Mathematics, or Engineering of any kind, is to teach exactly those things.
Wup dee F*$@in doo. My cat recognizes himself in a mirror. The real question is how much money was wasted trying to figure out if a magpie can recognize it's own reflection. Are people this retarded (or are the researchers behind this that desperate)? Are the people behind this really just former intelligent design zombies who are finally awakening to the fact that humans are animals too?
Linux is based on (even if it shares none of the code) Unix, which started 30+ years ago and never went away. Unix is not just an OS, it's a software development philosophy. Open source is another philosophy, and although it's tenets are independent from those of any particular piece of software/firmware, it makes a profound combination when applied to Unix. Sure, Linux may come and go (not likely) but you really want to bet safely, the Unix-like operating environment is not going anywhere.
As a resident of Massachusetts I don't think I'm alone in thinking that the headers to such documents should instead read "Common Ripoff". Other than Rhode Island I can't think of a more shady state legislature/crime syndicate. Of course, I could be wrong- if so I apologize to any Rhode-Island legislators.
"It ties you to an inflexible system"
Unix is an inflexible system? Let's see... it's totally modular (even more so in the case of Mach or the Hurd), Linux allows you to build literally any kind of system you want, and completely separates system from user processes to allow the kernel to be kept relatively small and tidy. Yup. That sounds *really* inflexible to me. Windows ties system and user processes together, ties the user to Microsoft programs for things as simple as text editing, has a registry system which invariably falls on it's face.. but it's flexible. That's really rich. Some Harvard MBA must've come up with this campaign.
"with movie admissions reaching their highest level since 1959."
since we're pushing 300 million people in this country, twice the amount of people here in 1959.
Well, you ought to pick up a book on the subject, and this may be a bad explanation.
The general idea behind a functional language is that everything can be a function. In pure functional languages, you don't assign a value to anything, but rather functions provide values. That is, you run a literal through a function and examine (or use) the result. In most functional languages however, assignment is possible, and variables often take the value of a function.
One of the implications of anything being a function is that the value of a function is oftentimes a function, in which case you have a closure, named because by running a function on a particular value, you create a particular function based upon that value, i.e. you have closed around that value (the value is stored within the created function).
Here it becomes apparent where functional languages got their name.
There are tons of other mechanisms to explore within functional languages, and like I said you should try to pick up a book on the subject. There are lots of good ones out there.
First, an interesting thing about this is that .NET really boils down to an XML parser/generator (or does it? the whole thing is a nebulus blur (surprise! another nebulous blur from the corporate world that is going to change the world!)) And XML is really just
.NET? How well engineered can this thing be?
.NET nebula? Why spend time trying to warp any good tool to fit the jacket created by one company?
S-expressions, which is really the whole basis if LISP. And all this time has to be spent retrofitting lisp to
Having said that:
This is a great effort, and functional languages are my idol, but why spend all this energy trying to retro fit LISP to the
.NET is just another intermediate language. Are we going to go through this every time company X comes out with an intermediate language?
Of course, this isn't just company X, it is Microsoft. And just the fact that this matters is spooky enough. But the question still stands nonetheless.
If Bill Gates died at the age of 32, that means he dropped out of college when
he was about 2 years old, and formed Microsoft at the age of 5!
Just goes to show you, he was truly amazing.
I might burn some Karma for saying this, but
Linux is symbolically a pawn, being used
by the giant corporations for leverage against their current giant corporation rivals
no doubt. when it comes to business, in America the big companies never do *anything* because
it's better. They only do it to make money. That's how they get to be so big and
correspondingly that's how their products achieve such an immense level of suckage.
Uh, Computer Science requires just as much calculus at my school as does EE.
This attitude is the reason why so much of the software out there is broken or woefully slow.
Then get your BS in Computer Science, so you won't be locked into hardware!
:)
CS deals with the thoeretical aspects of computation. As is often quoted here on /., Edsgar Dijkstra once pointed out that Computer Science is as much about computers as astronomy is about telescopes. Indeed, in your undergraduate curriculum at an accredited university, you will never take a required Computer Science course wherein the main goal is to learn how to program. Always there will be a theoretical end which is sought. In fact, I would say that Computer Science is simply a branch of mathematics which concerns itself with what is computable given a certain amount of time and a certain amount of space, and the classification of known problems via verification of reducibility of various sorts (look up the Cook-Levin Theorem).
Basically, Computer Science is way more enjoyable than learning how to deal with the fleeting technology of the moment, and I recommend it strongly if the search for universal truths is your bag.
P.S. If you just want to learn a language, learn LISP. It's a good one.
Computer Science is not programming! At the least it is the theory of what can be solved by programs given a certain amount of time and space. Beyond that, computer science is more like a subfield of mathematics, specialized in the design of algorithms and the abstracts of machines that can execute them, the design of programming languages and finally the effort to determine what problems are not computatble at all.
The building itself has a good chance of being a great success, despite the fact that so many resources will need to be concentrated in such a small area (food, water, fuel, medical supplies... the list goes on and on). The designers will probably take all this into consideration, and will hopefully leave lots of room for error through over-estimation.
But that's not the real problem here. This building is intended to solve a problem itself: the overflowing population in Shanghai. Sure, it will alleviate the scarcity of real estate for some people for some amount of time, but what about the future? Will we just keep building stuff like this to avoid the fact that our numbers grow exponentially? Any engineer is aware that an exponential function is not something you can work with beyond a certain threshold. i.e., you can't fight it by trying to accomodate the large values it produces- you have to find a way to change the situation producing the function to one that is more workable. This is the same kind of thing that computer scientists do when finding faster ways to compute things like matrix products etc.
My point is, by building this huge building to deal with the massive population of shanghai, we are just postponing the inevitable, and are not solving anything. How much is a project worth that doesn't actually solve anything? This is like using duct-tape to fix your car engine. We need to think of ways to limit the unchecked growth of our own population.
I love kids just as much as the next guy. Everybody loves kids. But we need to think about how many kids we can have and still ensure that they will all have a place to live (preferrably not a giant 300 story cage).
Just to point out that NP is actually a superset of the class P, the problems of which can be solved in polynomial time. These include some pretty simple problems (i.e. linear equations). So, to associate hardness with the class NP is not accurate by the definition. difficult != NP. However, a *different* class of problems, those that are NP hard, are theoretically difficult in that any problem in NP can be polynomial-time reduced to them, even if the problem itself is not in NP. A subset of the class NP hard is the class of problems which are NP complete . If these problems had polynomial-time solutions, then all NP problems would also have polytime solutions. Pardon my regurgitation of formal language thoery 101 :)
This is perhaps the fifth article I've seen on slashdot which spawns a lot of hemming and hawing over what to study in school. I was a computer science major in college, and hence did not come into the working world with a lot of expertise in quantitative science. However, a good computer science undergraduate program, or any science program for that matter, will teach you how to *learn*. I am now working for a federally funded defense contractor on projects which happen to involve some physics, but this does not make me ill suited for the work. I have simply had to learn what I need to know for the project at hand, and in the meantime the skills I learned as an undergraduate have helped the project, without my having to focus on learning quality programming practices. The point is, it's not what you majored in in college. College is only there to show you how to learn more. You can do that as a graduate student, or as a professional. Either way, you have the ability to acquire the knowledge necessary to do a job in an efficient and effective manner.
This is perhaps the fifth article I've seen on slashdot which spawns a lot of hemming and hawing over what to study in school. I was a computer science major in college, and hence did not come into the working world with a lot of expertise in quantitative science. However, a good computer science undergraduate program, or any science program for that matter, will teach you how to *learn*. I am now working for a federally funded defense contractor on projects which happen to involve some physics, but this does not make me ill suited for the work. I have simply had to learn what I need to know for the project at hand, and in the meantime the skills I learned as an undergraduate have helped the project, without my having to focus on learning quality programming practices. The point is, it's not what you majored in in college. College is only there to show you how to learn more. You can do that as a graduate student, or as a professional. Either way, you have the ability to acquire the knowledge necessary to do a job in an efficient and effective manner.
It is very true, and interesting no doubt, that the so-called script kiddies who think of themselves as thumbing their noses at authority are in fact most likely going to cause the unnecessary subversion of privacy in the long run. Cliff Stoll makes a similar point in the Cuckoo's Egg, saying that he wishes there were no need for a computer security market, and that there wouldn't be if people were more considerate in their use and acquisition of information. But at the same time, that's like asking all of the thieves and criminals in the world to stop what they are doing at once. There are always going to be a small percentage of mischievous people out there, and if there were no barriers in place to keep them out of the cookie jar, god knows the real damage they could do. Ultimately, the script kiddies are making it harder for the REAL bad ones, the ones who could start a war, for example. All we can hope is that the damage to our freedom and privacy is minimized in the process of preventing the inevitable criminal activity online.
uh, did I say anything about admiring anyone? (and even if I did, doesn't admiration stem from a high regard for one's beliefs?) Sorry bro, think before you speak.
It would be interesting to see what Philip K. Dick's reaction to these trying times of copyright infringement would be. Just from reading his essays I might imagine he would have embraced the current situation rather than spitting venom, if only because he would have wanted to do the opposite of what Harlan Ellison is doing. (come to think of it, didn't Ellison rip on PKD when he was alive over this same beef?)
If you study Computer Science rather than CIS, you may have to work harder, but you will also be happier. You may find that you can learn the CIS stuff too, but (and this is just my opinion) the math behind computer science is what makes it interesting. It is not represented well by courses like introductory calculus. It is typically discrete math, which is quite a different, and I think more rewarding, animal. Also, even if you end up with the same kind of job as a CIS graduate, you will have an edge, in that you will have had more difficult training and hence will be more prepared for whatever comes your way.