Because U.S schools aren't awful, right? Now I see how this all makes sense.
Exactly. If schools were functioning at close to an optimal level, these advertising campaigns would be totally ineffective. But this bit of wisdom is still true.
Seymour Papert did some very interesting work in the 70s -- part of this involved the creation of the Logo programming language/environment. But the more important piece of his research, IMHO, was the argument (totally ignored, as far as I can tell) that education should be remade to focus on individual students incrementally (re)constructing knowledge. How many 2-5th graders learn geometry this way?
There are valuable alternatives to the complete package that Microsoft is selling, but more-of-the-same is not one of them.
I agree, and I'd go as far as to say that those three languages ought to be functional Scheme (or Haskell), C, and Prolog. These represent the most common models of real-world problems.
I think that a great kind of tour de force CS project would be to implement in C (or C++) a parser generator, which is used to generate an SQL parser, from which the generated syntax trees are processed by an embedded Scheme interpreter to transform them into tiny Scheme programs which make the necessary queries against a Prolog database, which finishes the job of implementing a little relational database system.
I'm considering creating a little CS program for high school kids based on this project.
I think it's pretty obvious that guys like Babe Ruth have contributed much more to society than you have. Whether or not you personally value their contributions, folks with opinions like you are outnumbered.
He said it's "more fair" than government control, but you responded by questioning whether it matches some absolute notion of fairness (exactly the kind of thinking that gets government control in the first place -- a few elitists who think they know what's best for the market).
Also, while I'm not a fan of pro sports myself, I think it's kind of cheap of you to characterize pro baseball players as guys who just "hit balls with sticks." That's like saying that a programmer is just a guy who punches keys.
You laugh, but I've actually been working on a project I was going to call "Visual Lisp" (now B -- do the formatting yourself and you'll get the [bad] pun).
Here is a screenshot of a program written in "Visual Lisp" that shows a simple expression editor control on a simple form. There's a system for declaring GUIs (and event-handlers) in terms of S-expressions and everything. Depending on the programmer's preference, those GUIs can be shown on a Pocket PC, a desktop, or through a web browser (ie: rendered as HTML).
Oh, and my "Visual Lisp" interpreter also supports ActiveX controls.
Until then I know I'll never buy another Kodak product...
Then they'll sue somebody else. The reason they're resorting to something as stupid as this is because fewer people are buying from them in the first place (and they blame the computer industry).
How is that a problem? Is it a problem because maybe a date in one country has the year in a difference place than the date in another country? If it's something like that, hey you're in luck! The C++ iostreams library was designed with just such a possibility in mind.
The answer is that you've got to define your own datatype for handling "date" information and deciding on how it's to be output (which elements and in which order). This allows you to *simplify* the code that writes the actual data. For example:
You have made quite possibly the stupidest comparison I have ever seen on this issue. It's a sad day for slashdot that this dreck had any positive moderation at all (let alone 'insightful').
We're talking about the difference between sharing some interesting new technique and 'sharing' the fruits of *YEARS* of work. Yes, game makers share minor innovations of the sort that you describe without making an issue of it either (else there'd only be one guy who was allowed to implement bump mapping), but they don't toil away for years just to give it all away -- that's an untenable financial strategy.
I think that you're looking at it the wrong way. Your CompSci degree is very valuable, and it puts you ahead of most people out there in the job market today. Of course you can keep programming for the rest of your life, but you have to *solve problems*. Even if all you ever do is open a flower store, you'll find plenty of problems that the computational mindset can help you to solve. But there are more interesting problems than running flower stores out there too.
but Newton is famous for saying "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
... to which Hooke responded, "Damnit Isaac, get off of me!" which prompted John Wallis to exclaim, "Would you two knock it off up there?! You're killing my back!"
The idea that someone can be a good designer without occasionally dropping down into the 'gruntwork' of coding is like saying someone can be a good physicist without ever doing any math.
Remember Faraday? He was that guy who took Newton's old post as the head of the Royal Society.
You need them because the novice programmers don't have the experience to foresee and avert these big disasters. They should not be competing for the same job!
I think that's a very important statement. More companies should know this.
What exactly do you find disappointing about it? I'm surprised that it wouldn't at least make you seek out other efforts at discrete models of physics. Do you already know everything about Ed Fredkin? Do you already know about Feynman's agreement with the importance of discrete models? Did you already know about the nature of mathematical exploration (its kind of generic multiway system framework -- a computational framework in its own right)? Perhaps I'm just stupid, but I thought that the book was very very interesting. I even bought his earlier book on cellular automata to read more.
Slashdot Mirror
Because U.S schools aren't awful, right? Now I see how this all makes sense.
Exactly. If schools were functioning at close to an optimal level, these advertising campaigns would be totally ineffective. But this bit of wisdom is still true.
Seymour Papert did some very interesting work in the 70s -- part of this involved the creation of the Logo programming language/environment. But the more important piece of his research, IMHO, was the argument (totally ignored, as far as I can tell) that education should be remade to focus on individual students incrementally (re)constructing knowledge. How many 2-5th graders learn geometry this way?
There are valuable alternatives to the complete package that Microsoft is selling, but more-of-the-same is not one of them.
I agree, and I'd go as far as to say that those three languages ought to be functional Scheme (or Haskell), C, and Prolog. These represent the most common models of real-world problems.
I think that a great kind of tour de force CS project would be to implement in C (or C++) a parser generator, which is used to generate an SQL parser, from which the generated syntax trees are processed by an embedded Scheme interpreter to transform them into tiny Scheme programs which make the necessary queries against a Prolog database, which finishes the job of implementing a little relational database system.
I'm considering creating a little CS program for high school kids based on this project.
This happens just after I finish a project building a similar search engine.
I think it's pretty obvious that guys like Babe Ruth have contributed much more to society than you have. Whether or not you personally value their contributions, folks with opinions like you are outnumbered.
I completely agree. In fact, I'd wager that people would come back in larger numbers after an attack.
I moved to New York from Colorado after 9/11, for instance.
You've missed the point of what the poster said.
He said it's "more fair" than government control, but you responded by questioning whether it matches some absolute notion of fairness (exactly the kind of thinking that gets government control in the first place -- a few elitists who think they know what's best for the market).
Also, while I'm not a fan of pro sports myself, I think it's kind of cheap of you to characterize pro baseball players as guys who just "hit balls with sticks." That's like saying that a programmer is just a guy who punches keys.
How many of those 3,000 are qualified for the job? How do you determine who to hire?
You laugh, but I've actually been working on a project I was going to call "Visual Lisp" (now B -- do the formatting yourself and you'll get the [bad] pun).
Here is a screenshot of a program written in "Visual Lisp" that shows a simple expression editor control on a simple form. There's a system for declaring GUIs (and event-handlers) in terms of S-expressions and everything. Depending on the programmer's preference, those GUIs can be shown on a Pocket PC, a desktop, or through a web browser (ie: rendered as HTML).
Oh, and my "Visual Lisp" interpreter also supports ActiveX controls.
It's an AP article. The same thing showed up on CNN.com.
How ironic that MSN(BC) is pushing ...
You're wrong, it's an AP article. The exact same article showed up on CNN.com (and probably any other outfit that syndicates the AP).
Until then I know I'll never buy another Kodak product...
Then they'll sue somebody else. The reason they're resorting to something as stupid as this is because fewer people are buying from them in the first place (and they blame the computer industry).
Of course, I'm also the sort of person that thinks that imagining what Bill Gates' daughters will teach him about technology is fun
That has got to be one of the most irritating navel-gazing pieces I've seen on Slashdot, ever.
How is that a problem? Is it a problem because maybe a date in one country has the year in a difference place than the date in another country? If it's something like that, hey you're in luck! The C++ iostreams library was designed with just such a possibility in mind.
The answer is that you've got to define your own datatype for handling "date" information and deciding on how it's to be output (which elements and in which order). This allows you to *simplify* the code that writes the actual data. For example:
MyDateClass MyDate(1, 1, 2004);
cout << "Today is " << MyDate << endl;
So what's wrong with that?
You have made quite possibly the stupidest comparison I have ever seen on this issue. It's a sad day for slashdot that this dreck had any positive moderation at all (let alone 'insightful').
We're talking about the difference between sharing some interesting new technique and 'sharing' the fruits of *YEARS* of work. Yes, game makers share minor innovations of the sort that you describe without making an issue of it either (else there'd only be one guy who was allowed to implement bump mapping), but they don't toil away for years just to give it all away -- that's an untenable financial strategy.
I think that you're looking at it the wrong way. Your CompSci degree is very valuable, and it puts you ahead of most people out there in the job market today. Of course you can keep programming for the rest of your life, but you have to *solve problems*. Even if all you ever do is open a flower store, you'll find plenty of problems that the computational mindset can help you to solve. But there are more interesting problems than running flower stores out there too.
While you can thank Bell Labs for Information Theory, the laurels for Graph Theory belong to Euler.
You lucky bastard! He charged me $25.60.
but Newton is famous for saying "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
XML can be a medium for expressing programs anyway (eg: <car><list><a/><b/><c/></list></car> ; == <a/>).
The idea that someone can be a good designer without occasionally dropping down into the 'gruntwork' of coding is like saying someone can be a good physicist without ever doing any math.
Remember Faraday? He was that guy who took Newton's old post as the head of the Royal Society.
How would one automate software development?
You need them because the novice programmers don't have the experience to foresee and avert these big disasters. They should not be competing for the same job!
I think that's a very important statement. More companies should know this.
Maybe they just thought that your objection made such an obviously bogus assumption that it wasn't funny at all.
What exactly do you find disappointing about it? I'm surprised that it wouldn't at least make you seek out other efforts at discrete models of physics. Do you already know everything about Ed Fredkin? Do you already know about Feynman's agreement with the importance of discrete models? Did you already know about the nature of mathematical exploration (its kind of generic multiway system framework -- a computational framework in its own right)? Perhaps I'm just stupid, but I thought that the book was very very interesting. I even bought his earlier book on cellular automata to read more.
Sorry "Top Stoppard" was a typo. The man's name is "Tom Stoppard".