The question seems odd -- it's as if a carpenter asked whether she should specialize in the hammer, the saw, or the square.
Personally, I'd recommend learning to program in C, Lisp, and Smalltalk -- three different ways of thinking about programming -- Too bad SNOBOL seems to have disappeared -- it was even more different.
Of course, those will probably be dismissed as antiques, but they are widely available and have many modern derivatives.
How does the Lieber, Mazur,Lieber book (Infinity, beyond...) relate to Lieber & Lieber's Infinity from 1953? Is it a reissue / update? I found the latter in my high school library over 50 years ago (1958), and I liked it so much I was still wanting a copy when it became possible to look for used books on line. I succeeded in buying a copy in 2002.
As I look at the copy I have, I'm struck by what fine shape it's in, which is sad, as it is a copy withdrawn from the St. Ignatius High School in San Franscisco -- obviously because of lack of use...
After reading Infinity, I had to have The Education of TCMits, by the same authors. That's fun at least partly because of the mix of math and personal philosophy.
A few years ago, though, I started to wonder -- why do we seem to be concerned when the government has detailed information about us, but not when business does?
Your bank probably says they'll only share your information with related companies... but they carefully don't say what counts as "related"...
Was there anything in those records, I wonder, that the airline didn't know, or the credit card company?
I, too, drive a Prius. I find the earlier remarks about accelerating slowly and allowing the car to slow a bit climbing hills fit my experience. When I got the car, I couldn't get much above 35 MPG during the first month or so -- but as I came to understand those things, I've done much better. I now feel bad if my average mpg over a several-mile trip drops below 50mpg. Short trips are killers, regardless of how you drive -- the engine is warming up. On long highway trips, I do notice that there's a speed, typically between 60 and 70, where efficiency starts to drop -- but I can generally stay above 50mpg driving around 65mph.
I agree, it's come a long way. I think the biggest problem I saw was that the animated image was too "flat" -- although the teeth were curved, they didn't seem to fit the skull structure.
I must say, as one who's spent some time trying to draw portraits, humans are really good at sensing the structure under a face, particularly as it moves. It's really hard to get all the pieces to "fit together" -- particularly with a live model, since you may draw the mouth at a different time from the eyes, and the model can only sit "still" for a short time -- the stiller the shorter.
Would anyone except a US native even ask this question?
For the past 50 years it was probably a no brainer that you needed to learn English as an Engineer.
I think one needs to recognize that the days of the USA being the only/best place to get a high tech job are gone.
I suspect speaking only English is going to be a liability in the job market of the future, whatever your degree is in. Probably the only language you'll be able to get away with as your "only" language will be Chinese, and that's probably not a long term situation.
I suspect English, Chinese, and Farsi will take you a long way through the century, though -- and if you know those, you'll probably have no trouble learning another one when you need it...
I'd agree with 'start with Yourdon & Constantine', but I'd add Christopher Alexander's "Notes on the Synthesis of Form", and M.A.Jackson's "Structured Design", and his earlier work "Principles of Program Design" -- and probably his later work, although I've not actually spent much time with it. (Jackson's books are not meant to be "read" however, they're meant to be worked through -- if you don't stop and do the exercise when he suggests it, you'll say "Oh, yeah! That's what I would have done" -- and miss the point. )
It is important to recognize that design is in the realm of art, not in the realm of rules -- intuition not logic. It's a "right-brain" activity -- you have to trust your feelings, not your reason, to do good design. That's not to say reason and logic are not important and very useful -- but "The way that can be told is not the real way" -- like riding a bicycle -- staying upright comes from sensing and reacting, not from reasoning and reacting. (I got very frustrated trying to teach design / patterns to people looking for lists of rules to add to their process.)
The "Analysis of Design" is a left-brain activity -- reason and logic are what it's all about. Don't confuse "Design" and "Analysis of Design".
/usr/bin/dc has probably been around, largely unchanged, since before 1970. GNU probably reimplemented a version, but I suspect the original is still running on BSD or AT&T unix systems somewhere.
Probably some of the other original utilities, too.
Of course, it may depend on whether you count unchanged source code, or only the compiled version.
I still can run some of the Lisp programs I wrote in my Survey of Programming Languages course in 1970. But I'm running them on a much more modern machine than the IBM 7094 we used then.
Of course they don't do "useful work", except test my lisp system when I make changes to it.
Actually, I think the last actual 1ESS went out of service in the early 1990s, but the code was "converted" to run in the 1AESS in about 1975, and there are still (or were last year) some 1AESSs in service.
The same processor is in the 4ESS, which formed the backbone of AT&T's long distance network at least through 2000, and there are probably some still in service -- and some in Korea, too. That system went into service in 1976. The features have evolved a bit since then, but the basic call processing code in both 1AESS and 4ESS has been running since then.
I was a 1ESS developer from 1976 to 1980, and I regularly read/. 1ESS was an interesting machine, and the software was pretty amazing. BTL was a great place to work in those days.
It's not that we take seven seconds to act after making decisions -- rather, we make the decision and about seven seconds later tell ourselves we made the decision. That's when we update our internal model of ourself that we call "me" and is what we mean by "consciousness".
I don't think most people, including scientists, have a clear understanding of how "consciousness" relates to the body. I think these experiments will make it much clearer.
Those of us educated primarily in the sciences often fail to recognize the parts of ourselves that aren't part of our internal dialog, and it's not easy to do. I think that'll change as we try to build autonomous robots -- and then we'll discover where we've misunderstood the proper relationship between "science" and "mysticism". Statements like like "the way that can be told is not the real way" are not really as weird as most of us think they are -- it's a simple truth -- think about riding a bicycle vs. talking about how to ride a bicycle.
That should tell you something about the delay between doing something (like turning the wheel to keep from falling over) and being aware that you decided to do that.
As I read these comments, and think on my own fears, I keep wondering -- why is it ok for BigBidnis to do it, but not BigGovernment? Do you really think you have more ability to affect Microsoft than the government?
Would it all be better if the government took "don't be evil" as their motto?
Who has more information about you and your habits -- Google or the government?
How long will it be that way?
Did you read those "privacy policy" statements from your bank? They'll only share your information within their corporation and business partners -- anyone who wants money.
I prefer MacPorts to Fink -- you might want to check that out, too. Both have much of the same software, but MacPorts installation locations are "more standard" from a unix perspective.
Having worked on Unix systems for 30 years, I spend a lot of my time on OS X in emacs and terminal, just as I do on my Linux machine. Took me awhile to move from Solaris to MacOS X, but at this point I'm more comfortable on OS X than Linux -- but then I've never spent a lot of time on Linux.
If people will do that kind of work to address the inconsistencies, why not simply start coding to the standards? Eventually there will be layers for each browser that make them standards compliant. Of course, that site will be slower than those that don't need the layer. However, as FireFox / Safari / XXX become more standards compliant, the compliance layer gets smaller and they run faster.
When IE is the slowest browser, those who care will move to another browser and MS will see even fewer complaints about IE, and everyone is happy.
Well, too many people, seeing that 'i' on the end, think it's pronounced as if it were a 'y', that is, they pronounce it 'ee' but it should be more as in canadian, 'eh', eh? -- like the 'i' in 'it'.
My impression was that the 95% probability was that two postings were by the same author, not that they knew the identity of the author.
Say AnonymousCoward posts something clever on/. and then someone posts something similar on my blog and then on LemonOdor -- they immediately know it's some lisp geek doing it all and go see who's been trying to buy a Lisp Machine...
These are antiques, but then, I guess I'm getting to be one, too. I grew up in the '50s, (Grad HS in 1960/1).
First, I'll agree that reading to your kids until they can read to you is a good way to start. Encouraging them as they explain what they've learned by reading is another important thing to do, as I recall.
One great series was the Time/Life series on the sciences. I particularly remember the ones about Geology and Dinosaurs and the early eath, with pictures, etc. I think I started reading those when I was in 3rd or 4th grade -- probably because they were new then, or I might have looked at them earlier. The "Books of Knowledge" and "Books of Popular Science" came with the Encyclopedia Americana we got about the time I was in 8th grade (I have 3 younger brothers) and I spent a lot of time reading those.
In highschool, the books that really hooked me on Science and Math were the books by George Gamow, particularly 1, 2, 3, infinity, and probably Mr. Tomkins in Wonderland. I also stumbled on a really great, if somewhat strange, pair of books in a school library -- Recently I found copies of these so I now have my own: Lillian Lieber's (with wonderful illustrations by Hugh Lieber) The Education of T.C. MITS and the mind-boggling Infinity. They were old when I found them (T.C. MITS was published in 1942, Infinity in 1953). Infinity was my first exposure to transfinite numbers, when I was a sophomore in HS.
Of course, Scientific American was extremely important. As an Army Brat, we moved to Taiwan in 1957, and the local USIA library had a collection from 1948 on -- I read all the Mathematical Games columns, in particular. The Amateur Scientist columns were often very intriguing, but I didn't have the money (or perhaps gumption) to do most of those experiments, but I certainly read a lot of them.
Science Fiction, naturally -- Asimov, Blish, Bradbury, Clement, Heinlein, Sturgeon,... A.E. Merritt's Indiana-Jones-like heros were something I discovered around then, too -- but I was probably science/math/engineering bound long before that. I probably started with Heinlein.
Teachers who asked as many questions as they answered and forced me to think things through on my own were also key. My math teachers and science teachers really tried to teach logical / deductive thinking, not science-facts, and that's key. Hands on -- I joined the Science Club and we set up a "The Monkey and the Hunter" experiment for a whole-school presentation -- making that work, at least once, on stage, was a thrill.
On the other hand, I hated English and writing through most of highschool. My senior year, as new kid in school, I had an English teacher who finally got me engaged -- Somehow I got hooked on e.e.cummings' poetry -- and writing more (although I did try to write a bit of a science fiction story when I was in 8th grade). I took one or at most two writing courses courses that weren't required in college, but never did get into Literature. But writing remained difficult, primarily because I always tried to write in perfect prose from the beginning, rather than brain dump and rewrite (programmers are supposed to get it right from the start, eh?). It wasn't until I got to Bell Telephone Labs (...->Lucent Technologies) after a tour in the Nuclear Submarine force and Grad School, that I took a course in writing that helped make it easier to write.
First thing that was important was being taught not to worry about "the rules" but trust that, as a native speaker, if it sounded right, it probably was right -- at least as a starting point. Another key point was "If you want to be a good writer, write for at least 5 minutes every day". I took that one and used it on my sons when they were in gradeschool -- they had to write me a 100-word paragraph on any subject every day before they could get access to the TV / Computer (for games). They were allowed to use the computer to writ
I understand why tabs are "better", but that doesn't change the fact that I can't find the error by reading the printed version of the program.
By "printed" do you mean on paper? How often do you read programs on paper, as opposed to in a purpose-built editor?
How often do I need to do it for it to be relevant?
Certainly, more often I read code in an emacs buffer, nicely highlighted, etc. Paper is much more convenient in the car and/or the bathroom, however.
Still, I'm not required to code in Python, so it's not a problem.
I presume xe's not a Lisp programmer, given the closing marker phobia? Personally, I think including optional {, } block delimiters would be an improvement, but, hey, whoever designs the language gets to choose the syntax. The rest of us simply decide whether or not to use it.
Hmmm, I missed the ability to use spaces instead of tabs, perhaps that's changed from early Python days? Anyway, having just reviewed the rules in an online manual, and having a laptop of my own these days, I may just need to take another look. As soon as I regain my lisp.
Are outlines silly? Even look at this comment on Slashdot: it can be readily understood from its rendered form, which uses indentation to group statements from one person. Why do so many critics of Python have such a hard time accepting this alternative to block-end keywords
My objection to Python's choice is neither the dependence on indenting, which is fine, nor the lack of block-end keywords. Rather, it's the dependance on characters that are not visually distinguishable. I can produce two visually equivalent texts, one of which is a valid Python program and the other of which is just text -- If I do the indenting with space characters, instead of tab characters, it's not valid.
I understand why tabs are "better", but that doesn't change the fact that I can't find the error by reading the printed version of the program.
Notice that you're not having difficulty distinguishing the paragraphs in this message, even though I'm using blanks and blank lines to distinguish them.
Bell wasn't a natural monopoly, it was a de jury monopoly. You were prevented, by law, from stringing-up your own telephone wires across a city. Bell, and Bell alone, was allowed to do so.
It couldn't have been until modern technology, like cell phones and VoIP, that any competition could possibly exist. And even there, it's likely Bell would have refused to allow anyone to connect to the POTS network, and likely would have gone to congress and been granted a monopoly on cell and VoIP services.
Sometimes one needs to consider more than the conditions in 1980, like the conditions in 1880 -> 1925. Ma Bell's de jure monopoly didn't always exist -- it was created to limit the monopoly created in the unregulated market. Some aspects of building the monopoly were, let's say, unsavory -- big bankers (JP Morgan?) liked Bell's ideas / business, and refused to approve / reapprove loans to small phone companies so they could stay in business, and AT&T made the company an offer they couldn't refuse, so they joined the Bell System. I wouldn't bet similar practices aren't going on today with all the mergers going on.
At the point where the Regulated Monopoly was created, there were hundreds of phone companies, and the Bell System was restrained from acquiring any of them or operating in their areas. When I joined BTL in 1976, there were 1600 phone companies that were not in the Bell System.
The breakup of the Bell System was clearly a benefit to businesses. I'm not sure whether it was a benefit to residential customers, but in the end, I think it probably was. The Bell System's aim in the early days was to provide a phone in every house -- and it largely succeeded there.
There are very interesting interactions between the available technology and the appropriate architecture for large communications networks, and the changes in technology that came with modern electronics (computers etc) push in the opposite direction from before. The high cost of switching technology drove to the hierarchical network that existed in 1965. As the cost dropped, forces pushed in the opposite direction.
The business / people systems that had been built up to make the system work appropriately (Ma Bell) don't learn and adapt as quickly as is possible with lots of small companies flailing and failing. That produced lots of dissatisfied technologists and businesses who could see cost savings (often at the expense of "the little old lady in tennis shoes" [who we spent a lot of time thinking about, actually]) that couldn't be realized as quickly as they wanted. The breakup enabled the changes to move much faster.
The "problem" with the remnants of the old Bell System stem, in large part, from the fact that people live a lot longer than modern technological components. For instance, in 1935 it made a lot of sense to define system reliability requirements as "2 hours down in 40 years", by 1975 it was obvious we needed to redefine it to the equivalent "3 minutes down per year".
All sorts of business processes designed to work well in a regulated monopoly are totally unsuited to a competitive company (Why track who has a piece of leased equipment, the phone, when everyone who has one has one of yours, and if they have a problem they just bring it back and you give them a new one? People were shocked when, after deregulation, Ma Bell didn't know who had one of their phones and who had someone elses -- the phones didn't even have serial numbers).
I do know that although I am/was proud to work for the Bell System and retired from its shards, I will not be a customer of the thing now calling itself AT&T if I can avoid it. People who were served by SouthWesternBell seem to have been the most dissatisfied in ancient times, and that's the part that has taken over and become "AT&T".
Well, if you never stop on that 400 mile trip, or accelerate very slowly, and travel fast enough, your counter claim may well be true. However, I suspect physics will support the claim for "normal driving practice".
Speaking as one of those, now disillusioned, formerly smug, (yeah, right!) Prius owners, it's been an interesting experience learning to drive to get and keep the gas mileage up.
Major factors appear to be accelerating slowly, and avoiding frequent short trips -- Surprise, just like with my Passat. At 35-45 MPH, I can go a long way on level ground without running the gasoline engine, which is where the high milage comes from -- it's not hard to get 5 minutes or more at 75MPG. At interstate highway speeds, the gasoline engine runs constantly (air resistance, probably) and it's hard to get much over 50MPG. Throw in some stoplights and hills (especially if they're all uphills!), and it's hard to average much over 45MPG.
It's also important to keep the weather warm, of course. Driving at 20F seems to cost about 10MPG compared to driving at 60F -- my guess is a lot of that is due to running the gasoline engine to generate heat to keep the passenger compartment warm.
Hmmm. Assuming the article is correct, driving a Prius instead of a Hummer will hasten the time when that effect won't be a problem....
One needs to distinguish between what the company pays to hire someone and what the one who is hired is paid.
That may surprise you, but particularly with H1-B employees, there is often a significant difference. The hiring company contracts with an agency. Hiring company may pay $100K. Agency finds someone in India, say, willing to work for $25K. Agency pays transportation to the US, pays for a place in an apartment / house, gives them an allowance, and deposits $25K in their bank account in India. Agency makes $100K, probably pays out $40K and pockets the difference. It's a win-win situation, no?
Then the employee finds out what's going on and starts looking for a way to be drop the agency.
The numbers may be off, but the situation is not, or so I was told a few years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
The question seems odd -- it's as if a carpenter asked whether she should specialize in the hammer, the saw, or the square.
Personally, I'd recommend learning to program in C, Lisp, and Smalltalk -- three different ways of thinking about programming -- Too bad SNOBOL seems to have disappeared -- it was even more different.
Of course, those will probably be dismissed as antiques, but they are widely available and have many modern derivatives.
How does the Lieber, Mazur,Lieber book (Infinity, beyond...) relate to Lieber & Lieber's Infinity from 1953? Is it a reissue / update? I found the latter in my high school library over 50 years ago (1958), and I liked it so much I was still wanting a copy when it became possible to look for used books on line. I succeeded in buying a copy in 2002.
As I look at the copy I have, I'm struck by what fine shape it's in, which is sad, as it is a copy withdrawn from the St. Ignatius High School in San Franscisco -- obviously because of lack of use...
After reading Infinity, I had to have The Education of TCMits, by the same authors. That's fun at least partly because of the mix of math and personal philosophy.
So, let me add my endorsement for Lieber's books
Interesting to see what's there.
A few years ago, though, I started to wonder -- why do we seem to be concerned when the government has detailed information about us, but not when business does?
Your bank probably says they'll only share your information with related companies... but they carefully don't say what counts as "related"...
Was there anything in those records, I wonder, that the airline didn't know, or the credit card company?
I, too, drive a Prius. I find the earlier remarks about accelerating slowly and allowing the car to slow a bit climbing hills fit my experience. When I got the car, I couldn't get much above 35 MPG during the first month or so -- but as I came to understand those things, I've done much better. I now feel bad if my average mpg over a several-mile trip drops below 50mpg. Short trips are killers, regardless of how you drive -- the engine is warming up. On long highway trips, I do notice that there's a speed, typically between 60 and 70, where efficiency starts to drop -- but I can generally stay above 50mpg driving around 65mph.
I agree, it's come a long way. I think the biggest problem I saw was that the animated image was too "flat" -- although the teeth were curved, they didn't seem to fit the skull structure.
I must say, as one who's spent some time trying to draw portraits, humans are really good at sensing the structure under a face, particularly as it moves. It's really hard to get all the pieces to "fit together" -- particularly with a live model, since you may draw the mouth at a different time from the eyes, and the model can only sit "still" for a short time -- the stiller the shorter.
joe
Would anyone except a US native even ask this question?
For the past 50 years it was probably a no brainer that you needed to learn English as an Engineer.
I think one needs to recognize that the days of the USA being the only/best place to get a high tech job are gone.
I suspect speaking only English is going to be a liability in the job market of the future, whatever your degree is in.
Probably the only language you'll be able to get away with as your "only" language will be Chinese, and that's probably not a long term situation.
I suspect English, Chinese, and Farsi will take you a long way through the century, though -- and if you know those, you'll probably have no trouble learning another one when you need it...
I'd agree with 'start with Yourdon & Constantine', but I'd add Christopher Alexander's "Notes on the Synthesis of Form", and M.A.Jackson's "Structured Design", and his earlier work "Principles of Program Design" -- and probably his later work, although I've not actually spent much time with it. (Jackson's books are not meant to be "read" however, they're meant to be worked through -- if you don't stop and do the exercise when he suggests it, you'll say "Oh, yeah! That's what I would have done" -- and miss the point. )
It is important to recognize that design is in the realm of art, not in the realm of rules -- intuition not logic. It's a "right-brain" activity -- you have to trust your feelings, not your reason, to do good design. That's not to say reason and logic are not important and very useful -- but "The way that can be told is not the real way" -- like riding a bicycle -- staying upright comes from sensing and reacting, not from reasoning and reacting. (I got very frustrated trying to teach design / patterns to people looking for lists of rules to add to their process.)
The "Analysis of Design" is a left-brain activity -- reason and logic are what it's all about. Don't confuse "Design" and "Analysis of Design".
How about Squeak?
Of course, if you're already convinced that no good OSS comes from companies that develop proprietary software, it's a waste of time to go on.
cool -- friend of mine since grad school designed the ICL 2900.
I sent him a copy of the post.
joe
/usr/bin/dc has probably been around, largely unchanged, since before 1970. GNU probably reimplemented a version, but I suspect the original is still running on BSD or AT&T unix systems somewhere.
Probably some of the other original utilities, too.
Of course, it may depend on whether you count unchanged source code, or only the compiled version.
joe
I still can run some of the Lisp programs I wrote in my Survey of Programming Languages course in 1970. But I'm running them on a much more modern machine than the IBM 7094 we used then.
Of course they don't do "useful work", except test my lisp system when I make changes to it.
joe
Actually, I think the last actual 1ESS went out of service in the early 1990s, but the code was "converted" to run in the 1AESS in about 1975, and there are still (or were last year) some 1AESSs in service.
/. 1ESS was an interesting machine, and the software was pretty amazing. BTL was a great place to work in those days.
The same processor is in the 4ESS, which formed the backbone of AT&T's long distance network at least through 2000, and there are probably some still in service -- and some in Korea, too. That system went into service in 1976. The features have evolved a bit since then, but the basic call processing code in both 1AESS and 4ESS has been running since then.
I was a 1ESS developer from 1976 to 1980, and I regularly read
Joe
It's not that we take seven seconds to act after making decisions -- rather, we make the decision and about seven seconds later tell ourselves we made the decision. That's when we update our internal model of ourself that we call "me" and is what we mean by "consciousness".
I don't think most people, including scientists, have a clear understanding of how "consciousness" relates to the body. I think these experiments will make it much clearer.
Those of us educated primarily in the sciences often fail to recognize the parts of ourselves that aren't part of our internal dialog, and it's not easy to do. I think that'll change as we try to build autonomous robots -- and then we'll discover where we've misunderstood the proper relationship between "science" and "mysticism". Statements like like "the way that can be told is not the real way" are not really as weird as most of us think they are -- it's a simple truth -- think about riding a bicycle vs. talking about how to ride a bicycle.
That should tell you something about the delay between doing something (like turning the wheel to keep from falling over) and being aware that you decided to do that.
As I read these comments, and think on my own fears, I keep wondering -- why is it ok for BigBidnis to do it, but not BigGovernment? Do you really think you have more ability to affect Microsoft than the government?
Would it all be better if the government took "don't be evil" as their motto?
Who has more information about you and your habits -- Google or the government?
How long will it be that way?
Did you read those "privacy policy" statements from your bank? They'll only share your information within their corporation and business partners -- anyone who wants money.
I prefer MacPorts to Fink -- you might want to check that out, too. Both have much of the same software, but MacPorts installation locations are "more standard" from a unix perspective.
Having worked on Unix systems for 30 years, I spend a lot of my time on OS X in emacs and terminal, just as I do on my Linux machine. Took me awhile to move from Solaris to MacOS X, but at this point I'm more comfortable on OS X than Linux -- but then I've never spent a lot of time on Linux.
joe
If people will do that kind of work to address the inconsistencies, why not simply start coding to the standards? Eventually there will be layers for each browser that make them standards compliant. Of course, that site will be slower than those that don't need the layer. However, as FireFox / Safari / XXX become more standards compliant, the compliance layer gets smaller and they run faster.
When IE is the slowest browser, those who care will move to another browser and MS will see even fewer complaints about IE, and everyone is happy.
Well, too many people, seeing that 'i' on the end, think it's pronounced as if it were a 'y', that is, they pronounce it 'ee' but it should be more as in canadian, 'eh', eh? -- like the 'i' in 'it'.
My impression was that the 95% probability was that two postings were by the same author, not that they knew the identity of the author.
/. and then someone posts something similar on my blog and then on LemonOdor -- they immediately know it's some lisp geek doing it all and go see who's been trying to buy a Lisp Machine...
Say AnonymousCoward posts something clever on
joe
First, I'll agree that reading to your kids until they can read to you is a good way to start. Encouraging them as they explain what they've learned by reading is another important thing to do, as I recall.
One great series was the Time/Life series on the sciences. I particularly remember the ones about Geology and Dinosaurs and the early eath, with pictures, etc. I think I started reading those when I was in 3rd or 4th grade -- probably because they were new then, or I might have looked at them earlier. The "Books of Knowledge" and "Books of Popular Science" came with the Encyclopedia Americana we got about the time I was in 8th grade (I have 3 younger brothers) and I spent a lot of time reading those.
In highschool, the books that really hooked me on Science and Math were the books by George Gamow, particularly 1, 2, 3, infinity, and probably Mr. Tomkins in Wonderland. I also stumbled on a really great, if somewhat strange, pair of books in a school library -- Recently I found copies of these so I now have my own: Lillian Lieber's (with wonderful illustrations by Hugh Lieber) The Education of T.C. MITS and the mind-boggling Infinity. They were old when I found them (T.C. MITS was published in 1942, Infinity in 1953). Infinity was my first exposure to transfinite numbers, when I was a sophomore in HS.
Of course, Scientific American was extremely important. As an Army Brat, we moved to Taiwan in 1957, and the local USIA library had a collection from 1948 on -- I read all the Mathematical Games columns, in particular. The Amateur Scientist columns were often very intriguing, but I didn't have the money (or perhaps gumption) to do most of those experiments, but I certainly read a lot of them.
Science Fiction, naturally -- Asimov, Blish, Bradbury, Clement, Heinlein, Sturgeon, ... A.E. Merritt's Indiana-Jones-like heros were something I discovered around then, too -- but I was probably science/math/engineering bound long before that. I probably started with Heinlein.
Teachers who asked as many questions as they answered and forced me to think things through on my own were also key. My math teachers and science teachers really tried to teach logical / deductive thinking, not science-facts, and that's key. Hands on -- I joined the Science Club and we set up a "The Monkey and the Hunter" experiment for a whole-school presentation -- making that work, at least once, on stage, was a thrill.
On the other hand, I hated English and writing through most of highschool. My senior year, as new kid in school, I had an English teacher who finally got me engaged -- Somehow I got hooked on e.e.cummings' poetry -- and writing more (although I did try to write a bit of a science fiction story when I was in 8th grade). I took one or at most two writing courses courses that weren't required in college, but never did get into Literature. But writing remained difficult, primarily because I always tried to write in perfect prose from the beginning, rather than brain dump and rewrite (programmers are supposed to get it right from the start, eh?). It wasn't until I got to Bell Telephone Labs (...->Lucent Technologies) after a tour in the Nuclear Submarine force and Grad School, that I took a course in writing that helped make it easier to write.
First thing that was important was being taught not to worry about "the rules" but trust that, as a native speaker, if it sounded right, it probably was right -- at least as a starting point. Another key point was "If you want to be a good writer, write for at least 5 minutes every day". I took that one and used it on my sons when they were in gradeschool -- they had to write me a 100-word paragraph on any subject every day before they could get access to the TV / Computer (for games). They were allowed to use the computer to writ
How often do I need to do it for it to be relevant?
Certainly, more often I read code in an emacs buffer, nicely highlighted, etc. Paper is much more convenient in the car and/or the bathroom, however.
Still, I'm not required to code in Python, so it's not a problem.
I presume xe's not a Lisp programmer, given the closing marker phobia? Personally, I think including optional {, } block delimiters would be an improvement, but, hey, whoever designs the language gets to choose the syntax. The rest of us simply decide whether or not to use it.
Hmmm, I missed the ability to use spaces instead of tabs, perhaps that's changed from early Python days? Anyway, having just reviewed the rules in an online manual, and having a laptop of my own these days, I may just need to take another look. As soon as I regain my lisp.
My objection to Python's choice is neither the dependence on indenting, which is fine, nor the lack of block-end keywords. Rather, it's the dependance on characters that are not visually distinguishable. I can produce two visually equivalent texts, one of which is a valid Python program and the other of which is just text -- If I do the indenting with space characters, instead of tab characters, it's not valid.
I understand why tabs are "better", but that doesn't change the fact that I can't find the error by reading the printed version of the program.
Notice that you're not having difficulty distinguishing the paragraphs in this message, even though I'm using blanks and blank lines to distinguish them.
It couldn't have been until modern technology, like cell phones and VoIP, that any competition could possibly exist. And even there, it's likely Bell would have refused to allow anyone to connect to the POTS network, and likely would have gone to congress and been granted a monopoly on cell and VoIP services.
Sometimes one needs to consider more than the conditions in 1980, like the conditions in 1880 -> 1925. Ma Bell's de jure monopoly didn't always exist -- it was created to limit the monopoly created in the unregulated market. Some aspects of building the monopoly were, let's say, unsavory -- big bankers (JP Morgan?) liked Bell's ideas / business, and refused to approve / reapprove loans to small phone companies so they could stay in business, and AT&T made the company an offer they couldn't refuse, so they joined the Bell System. I wouldn't bet similar practices aren't going on today with all the mergers going on.
At the point where the Regulated Monopoly was created, there were hundreds of phone companies, and the Bell System was restrained from acquiring any of them or operating in their areas. When I joined BTL in 1976, there were 1600 phone companies that were not in the Bell System.
The breakup of the Bell System was clearly a benefit to businesses. I'm not sure whether it was a benefit to residential customers, but in the end, I think it probably was. The Bell System's aim in the early days was to provide a phone in every house -- and it largely succeeded there.
There are very interesting interactions between the available technology and the appropriate architecture for large communications networks, and the changes in technology that came with modern electronics (computers etc) push in the opposite direction from before. The high cost of switching technology drove to the hierarchical network that existed in 1965. As the cost dropped, forces pushed in the opposite direction.
The business / people systems that had been built up to make the system work appropriately (Ma Bell) don't learn and adapt as quickly as is possible with lots of small companies flailing and failing. That produced lots of dissatisfied technologists and businesses who could see cost savings (often at the expense of "the little old lady in tennis shoes" [who we spent a lot of time thinking about, actually]) that couldn't be realized as quickly as they wanted. The breakup enabled the changes to move much faster.
The "problem" with the remnants of the old Bell System stem, in large part, from the fact that people live a lot longer than modern technological components. For instance, in 1935 it made a lot of sense to define system reliability requirements as "2 hours down in 40 years", by 1975 it was obvious we needed to redefine it to the equivalent "3 minutes down per year". All sorts of business processes designed to work well in a regulated monopoly are totally unsuited to a competitive company (Why track who has a piece of leased equipment, the phone, when everyone who has one has one of yours, and if they have a problem they just bring it back and you give them a new one? People were shocked when, after deregulation, Ma Bell didn't know who had one of their phones and who had someone elses -- the phones didn't even have serial numbers).
I do know that although I am/was proud to work for the Bell System and retired from its shards, I will not be a customer of the thing now calling itself AT&T if I can avoid it. People who were served by SouthWesternBell seem to have been the most dissatisfied in ancient times, and that's the part that has taken over and become "AT&T".
joe
Well, if you never stop on that 400 mile trip, or accelerate very slowly, and travel fast enough, your counter claim may well be true. However, I suspect physics will support the claim for "normal driving practice".
Speaking as one of those, now disillusioned, formerly smug, (yeah, right!) Prius owners, it's been an interesting experience learning to drive to get and keep the gas mileage up.
Major factors appear to be accelerating slowly, and avoiding frequent short trips -- Surprise, just like with my Passat.
At 35-45 MPH, I can go a long way on level ground without running the gasoline engine, which is where the high milage comes from -- it's not hard to get 5 minutes or more at 75MPG. At interstate highway speeds, the gasoline engine runs constantly (air resistance, probably) and it's hard to get much over 50MPG.
Throw in some stoplights and hills (especially if they're all uphills!), and it's hard to average much over 45MPG.
It's also important to keep the weather warm, of course. Driving at 20F seems to cost about 10MPG compared to driving at 60F -- my guess is a lot of that is due to running the gasoline engine to generate heat to keep the passenger compartment warm.
Hmmm. Assuming the article is correct, driving a Prius instead of a Hummer will hasten the time when that effect won't be a problem....
I suspect you could look it up in Knuth, Vol. I.
Do programmers these days ever look at those volumes / know what they are? They're almost prehistoric.
joe
One needs to distinguish between what the company pays to hire someone and what the one who is hired is paid.
That may surprise you, but particularly with H1-B employees, there is often a significant difference. The hiring company contracts with an agency. Hiring company may pay $100K. Agency finds someone in India, say, willing to work for $25K. Agency pays transportation to the US, pays for a place in an apartment / house, gives them an allowance, and deposits $25K in their bank account in India. Agency makes $100K, probably pays out $40K and pockets the difference. It's a win-win situation, no?
Then the employee finds out what's going on and starts looking for a way to be drop the agency.
The numbers may be off, but the situation is not, or so I was told a few years ago.