First a joke: I thought the reason women were shunned in CS was because of the language Ada. If they'd called it Frank, maybe it'd be 'dominated' by women. (actually, Ada has some very cool features, especially for a language that old. But I still don't like it.)
I started in College in '86, and there were practically no women in the CS classes. Totally anecdotal.
...The gender disparity in programming is not the result of slight differences between men and women or subtle unconscious biases. It is the result of overt discrimination going back decades to the origin of the profession.
Hang on. You say that the disparity is not the result of subtle biases, and is the result of overt discrimination. But you don't say what discrimination. Do you mean against women, or against some group of people that are largely comprised of women? Because if the discrimination is toward socially functional people and there is a much higher proportion of socially functional women than man (more male loners), then I think that's an important distinction.
And an example of the mode of this discrimination is through fraternities and Elks lodges? Seriously?
There are a lot of numbers bandied about, but no baselines (other than an assumed 50/50?). How different is CS from any other engineering field? Form any field? From the workplace at large?
... And it will take overt action to correct the disparity.
Yup. Mothers (and fathers), teach your children to learn and enjoy science. America could use more of 'em, be they male or female.
But maybe it's playing out the same. Apple saw the writing on the wall. There was great wailing and gnashing of teeth, but after 2-3 years, nobody talked about floppies any more.
Is Netflix right? Is DVD movie distribution going the way of the floppy?
I was totally ready for floppies to go away 5 years before Apple made their move. But I could get anything on the network that I could get on a floppy. The same is not really true of DVDs, yet.
And in some places, now, it also turns out that you can no longer just leave your keys in your car overnight...
Really? Which places are those?
Do those same places have libraries? And do those libraries secure their wireless (they don't in California). What about the coffeeshops in those places?
In California, public libraries and many coffee shops have open access. I'm curious what access those kinds of institutions provide down under (and in other states).
I also have an open access point. Thank you to those of you out there in/. land who do the same.
What's even more ironic is that this is true despite the various ways that Apple has chosen to cripple the iPad. All they need to do is make something iPad-like that isn't crippled, and the people who want an iPad that isn't crippled will buy it. (I have an iPad and like it, but the fact that I can't do shortcuts on the keyboard and can't run an interpreter on it or fork subprocesses means that it is much less useful to me than it could be.)
I agree with everything you said. But there's a bit of a caveat: You and I represent a tiny tiny fraction of 1% of consumers: those with technical wants.
If Apple catered to us, then every stupid developer (99% of 'em - let's be honest) would fork stuff and use keyboard stuff and generally screw up the experience and battery life. It is entirely NOT in Apple's best interests (or the consumers that love iDevices) to allow those kinds of things.
In no particular order and for no particular reason, I'm just going to disagree with everything you say.
- web apps are easy to deploy.
Be that as it may, the difference in various browsers means the results are not always what you were hoping.
- web apps can't match efficiency of native apps (it doesn't matter when you have a multicore desktop, it matters when your smartphone has way less autonomy than it could.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/05/doom-ported-to-javascript-and.php Ignore moore's law at your own risk. It isn't so much that computers are getting faster, now - they're getting smaller and drawing less power. Today's "mobile device" is as powerful as yesteryear's computer, and that trend won't slow down for some time.
- web apps everywhere means they will have to be secured (compared with web 1.0 with standard ports for every protocol and a multitude of client/server software vs. port 80 and a handful of browsers)
I'm afraid I don't understand what you mean, here.
- web apps can be seamlessly upgraded (even when user doesn't want to, though)
And that's good and bad.
- native apps are hard to deploy (a free OS with package management, look at debian or experiments like nixos, solves this problem)
No current OS worth talking about is hard to deploy to.
- FOSS native apps can be owned by the user.
Why not a web app?
Anyway, this is just a trend. Games will still be native, and people will hold onto their office suites, and some html5 features reduce the dependency from the network (local storage) which is good.
HTML5 and friends are only recently/beginning to be implemented and already they are shaking things up. Javascript is one of the most optimized languages in existence. There may be a bright future of desktop-like apps that are deployed via the web.
So I can make my own small Ubuntu server running Boxee or something and have a Netflix viewer in my living room? That I built myself?
I don't think so.
Also I think most would agree that being able to play on Linux is a priority. I don't think it's paranoid to assume that Microsoft gave away a board seat partly to ensure that would not happen.
But the notion that Microsoft is keeping Netflix form playing movies on Linux is bunk. I believe the reason Netflix doesn't run on linux has nothing to do with Microsoft and has everything to do with DRM, marketshare, and support.
The ones who tie Netflix' hands are the studios, not Microsoft. As soon as there is a closed source DRM on linux that Netflix supports, I imagine linux will play Netflix. Microsoft be damned.
So you can make interfaces but they ultimately suck. Also I think most would agree that being able to play on Linux is a priority. I don't think it's paranoid to assume that Microsoft gave away a board seat partly to ensure that would not happen.
... I guess interfaces you make may suck, but I intend for mine to be exactly what I want. And it seems likely I'll do that. I'm a programmer.
I'm part way through writing my own interface that will let multiple users view their queues and juggle between them (so that people in the same household can manage each other's queues and see/set both people's ratings at the same time).
How would you feel if it was ~ 10 seconds of full motion video of the entire intersection? Would that allay your complaints? Would you still be against 'em?
Variables in algebra have nothing to do with variables in programming languages. In algebra, variables are syntactic sugar. They are used when we don't want to use fixed values. Such variables have no temporal aspect, they encompass the whole problem, there is no notion of them changing value, and there's no notion of any sort of storage being associated with them. A variable in algebra denotes a particular but perhaps unknown yet member of a particular set (of numbers, vectors, matrices, etc).
Really? As I said in another post: Sigma (x: 1..100) f(x) =...
It's something that comes up relatively naturally as you teach algebra. First you do everything with set numbers, and eventually you can do without set numbers once there is enough understanding of how numbers interact in algebraic expressions.
So: puts "Hello World" then later s = "World" puts "Hello " + s
In imperative programming, a variable is a symbol denoting a storage element of some sort. The storage element is stateful, there's a temporal aspect to it -- its state evolves in time. Suddenly a variable can take on different values at different points in time, and other variables' values may depend on it not only algebraically but also sequentially...
Look, I'm not saying it is identical, but I'm am saying the concepts are not a huge leap. I am saying that if you can't make that leap, then you're probably better off pursuing something else. State is a big concept, but if you've mastered some algebra and geometry it really shouldn't be a hard one. Performing matrix transformations, solving algebraic problems, heck - any non-associative math is a good example of state; all these things should provide a basic grounding that would let a student conquer an intro CS course.
In algebra, when you write x = y and claim it as a true statement, it means just that symbols x and y can be used interchangeably. In imperative programming, it means no such thing of course. If = denotes assignment, then x=y means that at a particular point in time (perhaps a recurring one, too!) value stored in y is copied over to x. If = denotes equality, then x=y means a boolean expression whose value is true if the values stored in x and y are somehow equal, again -- at a particular point in time.
I'm thinking I would avoid saying 'point in time' and go with 'for a given scope'. And I'd avoid re-using variables within scopes, which is just good practice, anyway. Once you have the concept of scope and the notion of variables being passed into that scope, then it feels a lot more like algebra.
int multiply(int x, int y) {
return x * y; }
f(x,y) = x * y
How is that not a function? How is that not algebra? If you can understand the algebra and not the code, then I'm thinking this is a mountain you should not continue trying to climb.
By the way, that seven languages book looks really interesting. Have you read it? Does it really fulfill its promise to teach you seven languages in seven weeks?
I did the book a little different - in a group of 4 over the span of several months. We did a chapter a month. Some of them were not strong programmers (recursion was a difficult concept). But they were reasonably strong at math, so it wasn't a huge leap...
It was an interesting experience in several respects: interesting to see the programming strength of several folks who did (or did not) refer to themselves as professional programmers. The book itself is not bad. I use one of the languages professionally (Ruby) and have done an overview course that included another (Prolog), and have had varying exposure to others, from none to some (via lisp). I would not say I came out of it "knowing" the 7 languages, but it certainly gives you a taste of them. Kind of like ordering a flight of beers. You'll get a good notion of whether or not you'd be willing to drink a pint, but even if you don't care for it, you'll probably be able to choke down a taste of something icky.
I did not complete the last chapter: Haskell Monads. It *was* too icky. I felt it was the weakest chapter (and he more or less introduced it that way). Mostly, though, there are other functional languages I liked so much better that I didn't feel I was really missing anything.
I disagree on several points, but mostly I think it isn't a very big leap from the differences of iterating over word problems to iterating over variable assignments. Even more so as the math gets (just a little) more advanced: Sigma(x -> 1..100) f(x) =...
And I think if you can't make that leap in a 15 week course, then you'd (and we all) would be better off if you lept in another direction.
See, you are a clear example of someone who doesn't get it. Have you never talked to a beginning programmer in your life? Have you not noticed that the way they think of variables in math is completely different than the way they think of variables in programming? Programming variables are containers, and math variables are constants. If you don't realize they are different, you will have trouble teaching people how to program.
Not only is that not true, it's also sometimes not true.
f(x, y) = x^2 + 2y + 3 or z = x^2 + 2y + 3
Is that math or programming? Hard to tell? That's because it's hard to tell. That's math. Algebra. And/or maybe some geometry, trig, whatever. If you can't take a math problem that is "solve for x" and see the next math problem that is also "solve for x" and start to get the notion of a variable, then you just don't belong. Every graph has the notion of variables that are used for every point of the graph.
To be honest, that's actually a fairly complicated piece of code. There are a lot of things you have to understand before you can ever get to the point of understanding that function...
No it isn't. And that's part of the point, isn't it?
You have to understand variables. You have to understand assignment. You have to understand passing variables in You have to understand returning stuff.
All of which is Algebra 1, or maybe 2, with the possible exception of passing variables. But even that should not be a stretch.
And that's all there is to it. CS1 should be very doable if you have mastered basic algebra. If you have not mastered basic algebra, I would question your presence in a university - let alone a CS class for majors.
The creator of Linux thinks the BSD license is more free. Now we can stop the fighting. BSD license doesn't try to tell other people how they can use the code, GPL does. Who is more correct man to say it?
Isn't this (the update) an implied admission that the original software tracking was wrong? I don't see how it could have been coded in, and have had the behavior described to it, as an accident. What will become of the data already collected?
Good grief. Still want this to be an issue?
Design document: We want to be able to determine location very very quickly. Much faster than GPS.
Developer:...OK. I'll just keep a cache of visited towers/wifi and their GPS location cached. That'll be super fast!
That's it, folks. The whole thing. non-jailbroken apps can't read the cache, so nobody cares. The cache never gets sent to Apple, so nobody cares. But it turns out that the cache is backed up to the computer, so people freak out. OH NOES!
Design document: Make people shut up about this file.
Developer:...Good grief. OK, I won't back up the cache to iTunes. And while I'm in the code, I'll trim the cache size - looks like it was getting big for some people.
OTOH, RAM from this era is about $20/gig, and any system should be able to take at least a gig.
So if they are hoping for ore than $20 of work from this intern over their entire employment, it's probably a reasonable idea to spring for the extra RAM to make this problem [more or less] go away.
Slashdot Mirror
/., please find a good editor.
First a joke: I thought the reason women were shunned in CS was because of the language Ada. If they'd called it Frank, maybe it'd be 'dominated' by women.
(actually, Ada has some very cool features, especially for a language that old. But I still don't like it.)
I started in College in '86, and there were practically no women in the CS classes. Totally anecdotal.
...The gender disparity in programming is not the result of slight differences between men and women or subtle unconscious biases. It is the result of overt discrimination going back decades to the origin of the profession.
Hang on. You say that the disparity is not the result of subtle biases, and is the result of overt discrimination. But you don't say what discrimination. Do you mean against women, or against some group of people that are largely comprised of women? Because if the discrimination is toward socially functional people and there is a much higher proportion of socially functional women than man (more male loners), then I think that's an important distinction.
And an example of the mode of this discrimination is through fraternities and Elks lodges? Seriously?
There are a lot of numbers bandied about, but no baselines (other than an assumed 50/50?). How different is CS from any other engineering field? Form any field? From the workplace at large?
... And it will take overt action to correct the disparity.
Yup. Mothers (and fathers), teach your children to learn and enjoy science. America could use more of 'em, be they male or female.
Just about on par with Apple killing floppies.
But maybe it's playing out the same. Apple saw the writing on the wall. There was great wailing and gnashing of teeth, but after 2-3 years, nobody talked about floppies any more.
Is Netflix right? Is DVD movie distribution going the way of the floppy?
I was totally ready for floppies to go away 5 years before Apple made their move. But I could get anything on the network that I could get on a floppy. The same is not really true of DVDs, yet.
Hear hear.
And in some places, now, it also turns out that you can no longer just leave your keys in your car overnight...
Really? Which places are those?
Do those same places have libraries? And do those libraries secure their wireless (they don't in California). What about the coffeeshops in those places?
In California, public libraries and many coffee shops have open access. I'm curious what access those kinds of institutions provide down under (and in other states).
I also have an open access point. Thank you to those of you out there in /. land who do the same.
We're way off topic...
What's even more ironic is that this is true despite the various ways that Apple has chosen to cripple the iPad. All they need to do is make something iPad-like that isn't crippled, and the people who want an iPad that isn't crippled will buy it. (I have an iPad and like it, but the fact that I can't do shortcuts on the keyboard and can't run an interpreter on it or fork subprocesses means that it is much less useful to me than it could be.)
I agree with everything you said. But there's a bit of a caveat:
You and I represent a tiny tiny fraction of 1% of consumers: those with technical wants.
If Apple catered to us, then every stupid developer (99% of 'em - let's be honest) would fork stuff and use keyboard stuff and generally screw up the experience and battery life. It is entirely NOT in Apple's best interests (or the consumers that love iDevices) to allow those kinds of things.
You have to be fair; noone will exploit a plugin nobody has installed or uses.
Netflix is still using Silverlight, right? Doesn't that mean it has a reasonably large user base?
In no particular order and for no particular reason, I'm just going to disagree with everything you say.
Be that as it may, the difference in various browsers means the results are not always what you were hoping.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/05/doom-ported-to-javascript-and.php
Ignore moore's law at your own risk. It isn't so much that computers are getting faster, now - they're getting smaller and drawing less power. Today's "mobile device" is as powerful as yesteryear's computer, and that trend won't slow down for some time.
I'm afraid I don't understand what you mean, here.
And that's good and bad.
- native apps are hard to deploy (a free OS with package management, look at debian or experiments like nixos, solves this problem)
No current OS worth talking about is hard to deploy to.
Why not a web app?
http://docs.google.com/
http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/05/doom-ported-to-javascript-and.php
http://www.kongregate.com/
http://facebook.com/
Javascript
Flash
Java Applets (har har)
HTML5
etc.
HTML5 and friends are only recently/beginning to be implemented and already they are shaking things up. Javascript is one of the most optimized languages in existence. There may be a bright future of desktop-like apps that are deployed via the web.
I have an iPhone.
Where do I go for my /. replacement?
Newsflash. In-house IT departments can be unreliable and pricey too.
No kidding.
Cloud services can be unreliable and pricey
Citation needed
Doubt I'm alone when I say, please let us know if you pull this off and have an app that does this.
My email address is kurt@CircleW.org.
Yours is?
So I can make my own small Ubuntu server running Boxee or something and have a Netflix viewer in my living room? That I built myself?
I don't think so.
Also I think most would agree that being able to play on Linux is a priority. I don't think it's paranoid to assume that Microsoft gave away a board seat partly to ensure that would not happen.
But the notion that Microsoft is keeping Netflix form playing movies on Linux is bunk. I believe the reason Netflix doesn't run on linux has nothing to do with Microsoft and has everything to do with DRM, marketshare, and support.
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/05/netflix-chrome-plugin-will-bring-on-demand-video-to-linux/
The ones who tie Netflix' hands are the studios, not Microsoft. As soon as there is a closed source DRM on linux that Netflix supports, I imagine linux will play Netflix. Microsoft be damned.
So you can make interfaces but they ultimately suck. Also I think most would agree that being able to play on Linux is a priority. I don't think it's paranoid to assume that Microsoft gave away a board seat partly to ensure that would not happen.
... I guess interfaces you make may suck, but I intend for mine to be exactly what I want. And it seems likely I'll do that. I'm a programmer.
As for shunning linux, netflix runs on any number of linux devices.
http://www.netflix.com/NetflixReadyDevices?cid=Game+Consoles
What do you think those tvs, blu rays, etc run?
You are being facetious, right?
I'm part way through writing my own interface that will let multiple users view their queues and juggle between them (so that people in the same household can manage each other's queues and see/set both people's ratings at the same time).
10/10
How would you feel if it was ~ 10 seconds of full motion video of the entire intersection? Would that allay your complaints? Would you still be against 'em?
Just curious.
...
Variables in algebra have nothing to do with variables in programming languages. In algebra, variables are syntactic sugar. They are used when we don't want to use fixed values. Such variables have no temporal aspect, they encompass the whole problem, there is no notion of them changing value, and there's no notion of any sort of storage being associated with them. A variable in algebra denotes a particular but perhaps unknown yet member of a particular set (of numbers, vectors, matrices, etc).
Really? ...
As I said in another post:
Sigma (x: 1..100) f(x) =
It's something that comes up relatively naturally as you teach algebra. First you do everything with set numbers, and eventually you can do without set numbers once there is enough understanding of how numbers interact in algebraic expressions.
So:
puts "Hello World"
then later
s = "World"
puts "Hello " + s
In imperative programming, a variable is a symbol denoting a storage element of some sort. The storage element is stateful, there's a temporal aspect to it -- its state evolves in time. Suddenly a variable can take on different values at different points in time, and other variables' values may depend on it not only algebraically but also sequentially...
Look, I'm not saying it is identical, but I'm am saying the concepts are not a huge leap. I am saying that if you can't make that leap, then you're probably better off pursuing something else. State is a big concept, but if you've mastered some algebra and geometry it really shouldn't be a hard one. Performing matrix transformations, solving algebraic problems, heck - any non-associative math is a good example of state; all these things should provide a basic grounding that would let a student conquer an intro CS course.
In algebra, when you write x = y and claim it as a true statement, it means just that symbols x and y can be used interchangeably. In imperative programming, it means no such thing of course. If = denotes assignment, then x=y means that at a particular point in time (perhaps a recurring one, too!) value stored in y is copied over to x. If = denotes equality, then x=y means a boolean expression whose value is true if the values stored in x and y are somehow equal, again -- at a particular point in time.
I'm thinking I would avoid saying 'point in time' and go with 'for a given scope'. And I'd avoid re-using variables within scopes, which is just good practice, anyway. Once you have the concept of scope and the notion of variables being passed into that scope, then it feels a lot more like algebra.
int multiply(int x, int y)
{
return x * y;
}
f(x,y) = x * y
How is that not a function? How is that not algebra? If you can understand the algebra and not the code, then I'm thinking this is a mountain you should not continue trying to climb.
By the way, that seven languages book looks really interesting. Have you read it? Does it really fulfill its promise to teach you seven languages in seven weeks?
I did the book a little different - in a group of 4 over the span of several months. We did a chapter a month. Some of them were not strong programmers (recursion was a difficult concept). But they were reasonably strong at math, so it wasn't a huge leap...
It was an interesting experience in several respects: interesting to see the programming strength of several folks who did (or did not) refer to themselves as professional programmers. The book itself is not bad. I use one of the languages professionally (Ruby) and have done an overview course that included another (Prolog), and have had varying exposure to others, from none to some (via lisp). I would not say I came out of it "knowing" the 7 languages, but it certainly gives you a taste of them. Kind of like ordering a flight of beers. You'll get a good notion of whether or not you'd be willing to drink a pint, but even if you don't care for it, you'll probably be able to choke down a taste of something icky.
I did not complete the last chapter: Haskell Monads. It *was* too icky. I felt it was the weakest chapter (and he more or less introduced it that way). Mostly, though, there are other functional languages I liked so much better that I didn't feel I was really missing anything.
I disagree on several points, but mostly I think it isn't a very big leap from the differences of iterating over word problems to iterating over variable assignments. Even more so as the math gets (just a little) more advanced: ...
Sigma(x -> 1..100) f(x) =
And I think if you can't make that leap in a 15 week course, then you'd (and we all) would be better off if you lept in another direction.
See, you are a clear example of someone who doesn't get it. Have you never talked to a beginning programmer in your life? Have you not noticed that the way they think of variables in math is completely different than the way they think of variables in programming? Programming variables are containers, and math variables are constants. If you don't realize they are different, you will have trouble teaching people how to program.
Not only is that not true, it's also sometimes not true.
f(x, y) = x^2 + 2y + 3
or
z = x^2 + 2y + 3
Is that math or programming? Hard to tell? That's because it's hard to tell. That's math. Algebra. And/or maybe some geometry, trig, whatever. If you can't take a math problem that is "solve for x" and see the next math problem that is also "solve for x" and start to get the notion of a variable, then you just don't belong. Every graph has the notion of variables that are used for every point of the graph.
As to it also sometimes being not true: you need to do some functional programming. The "Seven Languages in Seven Weeks" http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Languages-Weeks-Programming-Programmers/dp/193435659X book isn't a bad one. In some languages, variables simply are not variable.
To be honest, that's actually a fairly complicated piece of code. There are a lot of things you have to understand before you can ever get to the point of understanding that function...
No it isn't. And that's part of the point, isn't it?
You have to understand variables.
You have to understand assignment.
You have to understand passing variables in
You have to understand returning stuff.
All of which is Algebra 1, or maybe 2, with the possible exception of passing variables. But even that should not be a stretch.
And that's all there is to it. CS1 should be very doable if you have mastered basic algebra. If you have not mastered basic algebra, I would question your presence in a university - let alone a CS class for majors.
Kurt Werle says:
"Microsoft may have to start paying users in order to stay relevant."
Now can we have a stupid article that quotes me?
Headline: "Should Microsoft pay its users?"
Because saying something stupid seems to be the bar for getting mention, here...
The creator of Linux thinks the BSD license is more free. Now we can stop the fighting. BSD license doesn't try to tell other people how they can use the code, GPL does. Who is more correct man to say it?
I think you just defined flamebait.
Nice.
Isn't this (the update) an implied admission that the original software tracking was wrong? I don't see how it could have been coded in, and have had the behavior described to it, as an accident. What will become of the data already collected?
Good grief. Still want this to be an issue?
Design document:
We want to be able to determine location very very quickly. Much faster than GPS.
Developer: ...OK. I'll just keep a cache of visited towers/wifi and their GPS location cached. That'll be super fast!
That's it, folks. The whole thing. non-jailbroken apps can't read the cache, so nobody cares. The cache never gets sent to Apple, so nobody cares. But it turns out that the cache is backed up to the computer, so people freak out. OH NOES!
Design document:
Make people shut up about this file.
Developer: ...Good grief. OK, I won't back up the cache to iTunes. And while I'm in the code, I'll trim the cache size - looks like it was getting big for some people.
That's it. No story.
OTOH, RAM from this era is about $20/gig, and any system should be able to take at least a gig.
So if they are hoping for ore than $20 of work from this intern over their entire employment, it's probably a reasonable idea to spring for the extra RAM to make this problem [more or less] go away.