I'm not sure I understand; solution space is how you put the things in your programming language together to solve the problem. The closer the language makes this already, the better. All Turing-complete languages are computationally equivalent; the asm solution is not any more "real" than, say, a Scheme solution, performance considerations aside.
Compiler authoring is its own niche problem domain; there, one needs to use assembly. After that is done, you just use the compiler to solve other problems.
Also, imperative program flow is not "more real" than a functional-programming language definition of a function... that's a mindset problem that takes a lot of effort to break down (been there, done that, seen the light). Actually, a functional-programming version often demonstrates what the problem is about much better, making you think better about how to solve it.
I sort-of agree with you; I am not making an argument that one "should not" know assemby, or at least the principles of it so you can read output even if you did not actually write it yourself. It's about being a well-rounded programmer.
My issues are more about this (mythical, to me) attitude that some people display that assembly is "the real thing" that is just hidden by abstraction in higher-level languages and that this is some kind of a mental crutch and that the assembly is what somehow actually "tells you what is going on". It leaves me with the impression that their thinking about programs and computation is not on a particularly abstract level, and I generally use "abstract" as a positive word here... think "abstract" in the sense of mathematics.
Of course, with a lot of modern programming languages, you don't even have a compiler that outputs anything, so understanding assembly is not going to give you any idea of what actually happens on the machine when you run, say, Ruby code.
Well, if over 15 years of coding, plus a Master's degree in CS has not made me "see things in assembler", I wonder what would. It's just a completely strange way of modelling things when it comes to formulating Turing-complete formal solutions to problems, which is what programming is.
In algorithmics (where I more specifically got my degree in), asymptotic complexity beats architectural details every time...
I actually have never believed that assembly is in any sense informative or educational because "it is how the computer works". It's actually a remarkably hard to decipher representation of a program, and what the program is and does is the important part.
I consider myself quite a strong programmer, and I never think in terms of assembly when writing programs. Higher-level languages, in particular functional programming languages, are far closer to my mental model of things. Why not work in a language that represents or helps formulate the problem-space abstractions better?
This idea fails at the fact that Symbian is actually a far superior embedded OS than anything MS has to offer, and that, uh, they've been making phones that do other things than "just make calls" for the past decade or so.
It's just that they failed to read the customer in the shininess department, that's all.
While it's good to have some programming language in your back pocket for CS studies, the issue IMO is that those really are not "tools of the trade"... I hardly programmed at all for my own Master's in CS. The tools of the trade are pencil and paper mostly.
Now, programming language design and compilers is certainly a subfield of CS, and some of the most interesting languages ever have come from academia (thinking of Lisp, Prolog, Haskell)... but "programming skill" is not per se an academic discipline.
Sweden and the rest of the Nordics. Denmark, Norway, Finland, Iceland.
Some of it may be cultural and come from having pretty homogenous societies as far as social norms go, but IMO I've always considered our societies to be proof positive that many neoliberal claims of why "Socialism" won't and can't work are overhyped.
It's certainly not paradise and has its issues, but I wouldn't want to switch -- and it seems to me that the people who are most ideologically bothered by how we do things up here to be those ones who feel that social stratification is desirable and that they are the übermensch who is being oppressed by the unwashed masses...
Yes, sometimes considered; common usage... but it's still a wrong common usage, that I will keep pointing out, in particular as there is some charged politics here:-)
The whole geographical point here is the Scands mountain range, that runs north-south in Sweden and Norway. Hence, Scandinavian peninsula.
Whether the "cultural" argument is valid is a bit contentious -- a lot of the typically Swedish-speaking Nordists who are objectively speaking a bunch of Swedish imperialists certainly want to extend the concept of Scandinavia to include Finland ("because it is good for us").
Personally, although we all live a in typical Western European democracy with similar political leanings, I find Scandinavia to be culturally different. And of course it is linguistically different too; it's just that for some weird political reason, Finnish never is allowed to "count" in these kinds of considerations. After all, we're a bilingual country and all that, and in the future Swedish is going to be the mother tongue of all of us...
It's still wrong, and the Cold-War invention "Nordic countries" should perhaps be preferred if Finland must be included. Scandinavia is definitely not only a geographically separate entity, but a separate cultural-linguistic whole as well. Just listen to the Swedish People's Party folks who insist on us having to integrate to Scandinavia because it's so damned special compared to *us* (of course, an alternate variant of this argument is the idea that nothing except Swedishness exists, and the wrong kind of people will be allowed into the club after enough manipulation into accepting the idea themselves).
Interestingly, a few weeks ago I read that something very much like this also was some sort of graduation project of a couple of students at a tech school here in Finland... don't have the link handy unfortunately.
The problem with prizes is that you get them post fact. You may be a starving genius who solves some problem, but once you've solved it, it doesn't really push you any further that you get a prize for it.
This reminds me of people being accused of mental unstability for being republican under a monarchy, pro-western under Soviet communism, atheist under a theocracy, religious among atheists, and so it goes on.
Finnish-speaking (and holding onto your rights) under officially bilingual Finland...
Astronomy is awesome, esp. if you're involved with something like the Finnish astronomical society, Ursa... they build their own observatories which are frankly really impressive for an amateur, volunteer effort.
Originally perhaps not, but the KV tanks and T-34 and so on were beasts, and the Russians managed to produce lots and lots of them, too, later on during the war. This is why it really is the USSR that won WW2 on the ground; American bombing certainly helped destroy Germany's production capacity.
The Beer rocks are home to a broad spectrum of microbes, including photosynthesising cyanobacteria. "We thought it would be fun to send Beer into space," says Olsson-Francis.
The last paragraph is interesting considering that Sagan pointed out that the first high-powered tv broadcasts that might be intercepted by the aliens show Hitler at the Nürnberg party rally:-)
That's exactly why expending too much effort on just a "learning experience" is not such a great idea, because it is a learning experience, not "real research"... and if it ends up being "junk" by producing too much random noise in the thesis, it's far better to just write a consistent, neat, smaller thesis to demonstrate thesis-writing capability...
I can understand a certain good-enough mentality here.
This is the reason why original research is actually frowned upon where I graduated from at this level:-) if stuff is properly sourced, it's easier to verify what you're saying and that you understand what you're saying.
Original research requires some sort of peer-review vetting process so it's harder to verify and grade. The profs focus preferably to "real" research...
And oh yeah, as it comes to grading, if I were a professor I genuinely would maybe prefer my student not making a flat out inconsistent argument that makes the "let's practice writing an academic work" look worse, than if he wasn't producing overt amounts of data that actually cause that inconsistency to show up;)
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I'm not sure I understand; solution space is how you put the things in your programming language together to solve the problem. The closer the language makes this already, the better. All Turing-complete languages are computationally equivalent; the asm solution is not any more "real" than, say, a Scheme solution, performance considerations aside.
Compiler authoring is its own niche problem domain; there, one needs to use assembly. After that is done, you just use the compiler to solve other problems.
Also, imperative program flow is not "more real" than a functional-programming language definition of a function... that's a mindset problem that takes a lot of effort to break down (been there, done that, seen the light). Actually, a functional-programming version often demonstrates what the problem is about much better, making you think better about how to solve it.
I sort-of agree with you; I am not making an argument that one "should not" know assemby, or at least the principles of it so you can read output even if you did not actually write it yourself. It's about being a well-rounded programmer.
My issues are more about this (mythical, to me) attitude that some people display that assembly is "the real thing" that is just hidden by abstraction in higher-level languages and that this is some kind of a mental crutch and that the assembly is what somehow actually "tells you what is going on". It leaves me with the impression that their thinking about programs and computation is not on a particularly abstract level, and I generally use "abstract" as a positive word here... think "abstract" in the sense of mathematics.
Of course, with a lot of modern programming languages, you don't even have a compiler that outputs anything, so understanding assembly is not going to give you any idea of what actually happens on the machine when you run, say, Ruby code.
Well, if over 15 years of coding, plus a Master's degree in CS has not made me "see things in assembler", I wonder what would. It's just a completely strange way of modelling things when it comes to formulating Turing-complete formal solutions to problems, which is what programming is.
In algorithmics (where I more specifically got my degree in), asymptotic complexity beats architectural details every time...
And yes, I do consider Knuth to be overrated :p
I actually have never believed that assembly is in any sense informative or educational because "it is how the computer works". It's actually a remarkably hard to decipher representation of a program, and what the program is and does is the important part.
I consider myself quite a strong programmer, and I never think in terms of assembly when writing programs. Higher-level languages, in particular functional programming languages, are far closer to my mental model of things. Why not work in a language that represents or helps formulate the problem-space abstractions better?
This idea fails at the fact that Symbian is actually a far superior embedded OS than anything MS has to offer, and that, uh, they've been making phones that do other things than "just make calls" for the past decade or so.
It's just that they failed to read the customer in the shininess department, that's all.
Finland isn't "Scandinavian" really, contrary to the typical American misconception and the fantasies of Swedish imperialists...
"Under 10x the speed of C" sounds like a reasonable bound to me...
While it's good to have some programming language in your back pocket for CS studies, the issue IMO is that those really are not "tools of the trade"... I hardly programmed at all for my own Master's in CS. The tools of the trade are pencil and paper mostly.
Now, programming language design and compilers is certainly a subfield of CS, and some of the most interesting languages ever have come from academia (thinking of Lisp, Prolog, Haskell)... but "programming skill" is not per se an academic discipline.
Sweden and the rest of the Nordics. Denmark, Norway, Finland, Iceland.
Some of it may be cultural and come from having pretty homogenous societies as far as social norms go, but IMO I've always considered our societies to be proof positive that many neoliberal claims of why "Socialism" won't and can't work are overhyped.
It's certainly not paradise and has its issues, but I wouldn't want to switch -- and it seems to me that the people who are most ideologically bothered by how we do things up here to be those ones who feel that social stratification is desirable and that they are the übermensch who is being oppressed by the unwashed masses...
Yes, sometimes considered; common usage... but it's still a wrong common usage, that I will keep pointing out, in particular as there is some charged politics here :-)
The whole geographical point here is the Scands mountain range, that runs north-south in Sweden and Norway. Hence, Scandinavian peninsula.
Whether the "cultural" argument is valid is a bit contentious -- a lot of the typically Swedish-speaking Nordists who are objectively speaking a bunch of Swedish imperialists certainly want to extend the concept of Scandinavia to include Finland ("because it is good for us").
Personally, although we all live a in typical Western European democracy with similar political leanings, I find Scandinavia to be culturally different. And of course it is linguistically different too; it's just that for some weird political reason, Finnish never is allowed to "count" in these kinds of considerations. After all, we're a bilingual country and all that, and in the future Swedish is going to be the mother tongue of all of us...
It's still wrong, and the Cold-War invention "Nordic countries" should perhaps be preferred if Finland must be included. Scandinavia is definitely not only a geographically separate entity, but a separate cultural-linguistic whole as well. Just listen to the Swedish People's Party folks who insist on us having to integrate to Scandinavia because it's so damned special compared to *us* (of course, an alternate variant of this argument is the idea that nothing except Swedishness exists, and the wrong kind of people will be allowed into the club after enough manipulation into accepting the idea themselves).
Torvalds is Finnish; Finland is strictly not Scandinavian. Scandinavia is the peninsula with Sweden and Norway.
Interestingly, a few weeks ago I read that something very much like this also was some sort of graduation project of a couple of students at a tech school here in Finland... don't have the link handy unfortunately.
The problem with prizes is that you get them post fact. You may be a starving genius who solves some problem, but once you've solved it, it doesn't really push you any further that you get a prize for it.
Finnish-speaking (and holding onto your rights) under officially bilingual Finland...
Astronomy is awesome, esp. if you're involved with something like the Finnish astronomical society, Ursa... they build their own observatories which are frankly really impressive for an amateur, volunteer effort.
http://www.ursa.fi/galleria/index.php?cat=9&theme=xxx
Originally perhaps not, but the KV tanks and T-34 and so on were beasts, and the Russians managed to produce lots and lots of them, too, later on during the war. This is why it really is the USSR that won WW2 on the ground; American bombing certainly helped destroy Germany's production capacity.
They had beer. I could do that.
There too. I'm not American :)
Oh no, it was pretty much just free men who were "citizens". Slaves and women were different.
The last paragraph is interesting considering that Sagan pointed out that the first high-powered tv broadcasts that might be intercepted by the aliens show Hitler at the Nürnberg party rally :-)
That's exactly why expending too much effort on just a "learning experience" is not such a great idea, because it is a learning experience, not "real research"... and if it ends up being "junk" by producing too much random noise in the thesis, it's far better to just write a consistent, neat, smaller thesis to demonstrate thesis-writing capability...
I can understand a certain good-enough mentality here.
This is the reason why original research is actually frowned upon where I graduated from at this level :-) if stuff is properly sourced, it's easier to verify what you're saying and that you understand what you're saying.
Original research requires some sort of peer-review vetting process so it's harder to verify and grade. The profs focus preferably to "real" research...
And oh yeah, as it comes to grading, if I were a professor I genuinely would maybe prefer my student not making a flat out inconsistent argument that makes the "let's practice writing an academic work" look worse, than if he wasn't producing overt amounts of data that actually cause that inconsistency to show up ;)
Ok, it's just different level of requirement then. Here, "original research" gets you the top score pretty much and it rarely happens.