I am amazed that almost no one seems to be aware that Dr Wirth is 3 generations of software beyond his original Pascal. He also created Modula, then Oberon and is now working on Project Oberon using Oberon-7. The spin off company Oberon Microsystems created the framework BlackBox and a superset of Oberon called Component Pascal. Component Pascal is now maintained by the user community and is open source. http://blackboxframework.org/i...
I don't especially like Pascal but I love Component Pascal!
We had one of the 3 armatures from King Kong in our closet for several years. My brother, Jim Danforth, knew Ray Harryhausen and did similar puppet animation in the '60, such as "When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth" and "The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao". Harryhausen was a house hold word in our family.
When you are 7 years old you need to be outside experiencing the world and playing physical games with your friends, not sitting inside at a computer terminal.
The only reason I use Windows is because of BlackBox/Component Pascal. BB only runs on Windows. I reject all C syntax based computer languages. The concise language specification for Component Pascal and its elegance is a clear win for me.
When the compiler finds an error I want the caret to be placed precisely into the document where the error occurs NOT into some other sub window specifying a line number. That makes a very big difference in rapid development.
I feel sorry for all of you who have been raised on the VisualXXX development environment.
There are actually two answers: programming in general or programming for the commercial web based market.
Your comments assume a commercial market. However, I would suggest completely forgetting about PhP or SQL or Python or C/CC+ or Java. All of those languages do not get to the core of what constitutes good programming.
Only Nicklaus Wirth has endeavored to formulate precise syntax which is "As simple as possible, but not simple" for programming.
The evolution of his thinking can be found in the successive development of the languages: Pascal, Modula, Oberon, Component Pascal, Oberon-7
Each has refined and strengthened the programming core.
I suggest that you start with the open source language Component Pascal and its development environment called BlackBox (everything is hidden unless you explicitly export it) produced by Oberon Microsystems Inc. http://www.oberon.ch/BlackBox
There is another downside that I just realized. For quite a number of years my feet have been bothering me. I think I have found the answer. Too much sitting! I spend at least 8 hours a day at the computer sitting. I have recently tried standing while typing (I am doing that now) and the feet are slightly better. I believe the circulation to my legs is restricted by constant pressure but then it probably depends upon the "mass of the ass". I am quite thin, weigh 142lbs and so do not have too much padding. But this should be a general phenomena so recommend that you frequently get up and walk around. I am in fairly good shape for my age since I walk/run at mile a day. But the sitting undoes that good work.
My world is far from black and white. But there are certain limits to behavior and killing is the worst that one can do. Too much violence, too much to the 'rails'. Stories and movies with substance used to have subtle content. Now anything goes and it seems that the writers are trying harder and harder to find things with "shock value" just to get your attention so that advertiser will earn money. Ah, greed. Love it! (That's sarcasm if you didn't notice).
Component Pascal is a successor of Pascal which follows the evolutionary line: Pascal=>Modula=>Oberon=>Component Pascal
Niklaus Wirth has spent his life designing clean succinct syntax and semantic systems.
If one wishes to truly understand computer programming without unnecessary baggage then I would strongly recommend the BlackBox/Component Pascal development environment to a new student. see
The languages from Niklaus Wirth (Pascal, Modula, Oberon, Component Pascal) adhere to Edsger Dijkstra's Weakest Precondition.
The C/C++ languages do not.
When you write a function you need to specify the weakest precondition on the inputs that will guarantee the post condition of the outputs. These preconditions need to be specified as guards that test the input for satisfaction with the preconditions.
Component Pascal ALWAYS checks array bounds (you can't turn it off) so you never can write to or read from unallocated memory.
It also has garbage collection that completely avoids dangling pointers.
Choose a good language and follow Dijkstra's principles and you code will be much better.
Now that we're talking about 'languages that invite bad coding practices'... Well, one of the best programming books I've read is 'Perl Best Practices'. Not only does it list out best practices but it tries to explain (well I might add) why you should code a certain way and why other ways aren't good to follow.
One of the habits I picked up from 'Perl Best Practices is:
if (condition) { } else { }
instead of:
if (condition) { } else { }
The else tends to get 'lost' when just following the closing bracket.
IF condition THEN ELSE END
#define IF if( #define THEN ){ #define ELSE;}else{ #define END;}
Since I was raised on Algol I find the "IF THEN ELSE END" construct far easier to see and read.
With a BS and MS in physics I find programming to get in the way of what the physics is about.
On the other hand I have spent 40 years programming and find it forces one to clarify the ideas behind any area.
I was taught Algol-60 at Stanford from the computer science department. At that time the physics department did not require any programming.
The experience of Algol lead to SAIL (Stanford AI Language) and then MAINSAIL (Machine Independent SAIL) and later Oberon and now BlackBox/Component Pascal.
All of these languages were influenced by Nicklaus Wirth who taught at ETH Zurich. Dr. Wirth adopted from Albert Einstein the phrase "As simple as possible, but not simpler" as a slogan for the Oberon Language. Einstein got his undergraduate degree from ETH Zurich. So there have a beautiful blending of physics and computer science.
One needs to be able to think abstractly as well as concretely with physics. The ABSTRACT facility and Object Oriented aspects of Component Pascal aid here. But unlike Smalltalk one is not forced to use objects. One can get down to the machine level if need be using a CODE construct within the language.
Although I have seen but not used MathLab I believe such already written graphical facilities are a benefit. Why reinvent the wheel unless it is part of the learning process.
I whole heartedly reject the C/C++ class of languages as 'programming in a can'. Far, far, too complex and syntactically messy.
Spacecraft charge has long been a problem with satellites. The OGO IV satellite (circa 1968) was frequently negative due to the fact that the electron temperature in the ionosphere is higher than the ion temperature. As such there is a net electron flow to the satellite until its charge repels the electrons for a balanced +/- flow.
But this is not always the case since the solar panels on the craft have exposed electrical contacts. The charging panels can drive electrons away from the craft and give (every once in a while) a net positive charge to the craft.
Plasmas are tricky beasts. Simulations of the space environment on earth are frequently wrong.
Use a good language! That will reduce the complexity of your code greatly.
Forget C/C++. You just can't write good code in those languages.
I prefer BlackBox/Component Pascal.
o Modular
o Garbage collection
o Great compiler that puts the cursor *at* the error in your text.
o Development environment has compound documents for high quality publishable writing and the same document for source code. You can embed bitmap images to aid documentation of your code.
o No make files!
o No compiler switches!
o No linker switches (no explicit linker)!
o ABSTRACT and EXTENSIBLE data types for generalizable programming.
o many other good features.
Best regards,
Doug Danforth
Although wonderfully elegant it seems more like a taxonomy of particles and fields rather than a theory of everything. What underlies and determines a "particle"? Why so many fields? I would think a theory of everything would be composed of a single field interacting with itself to give various configurations which would appear to be other fields and appear to be localized particles.
I vote for the original Oberon-0 operating system and programming language by Niklaus Wirth. That system used only 300K bytes. It includes the compiler, graphical user interface, documentation, file system, and more. The system is modular and strongly typed.
They are there. We just don't recognize the magnitude of the effects that they are generating. Perhaps "dark matter" is really their technology used to retain matter around a galaxy.
The only way I can deal with spam is to use a white list. If you are not on my white list you go into my trash. This means that you need to find some other way to get my attention before I will put you on my white list.
This is simply for self preservation since I receive over 250 spam messages a day!
Science News week of June 3, 2006; Vol. 169, No. 22 , p. 348
As waters part, polygons appear
Peter Weiss
Imagine a hurricane with an eye in the shape of a propeller amid the swirling clouds. Physicists have observed something almost as strange in whirlpools that they made by swirling liquids in a novel way. Within the whirlpools, they've seen three-blade-propeller shapes as well as regular polygons, including squares and hexagons.
a7340_1457.jpg
CURRENT EVENT. A whirlpool, viewed from above, takes a pentagonal shape just above the spinning platter that's causing the water to swirl.
T. Jansson, et al./Physical Review Letters
The behavior of liquids in rotating containers has long fascinated physicists. For instance, in a famous late-1600s study, Isaac Newton pondered why the surface of water in a rotating bucket becomes concave.
In the new experiments, Tomas Bohr and his colleagues at the Technical University of Denmark in Lyngby observed liquids in a cylindrical, Plexiglas container that doesn't actually turn. Instead, a plate attached to a motor-driven shaft spins at up to 7 revolutions per second inside the container, while the vessel itself remains still.
As expected, in experiments with water or with viscous ethylene glycol, the spinning platter swirled the liquid above it to create whirlpools. But the throats of those whirlpools tapered to surprising shapes at the platter's surface, the team reports in the May 5 Physical Review Letters.
In the water experiments, those shapes transformed as speed increased, changing from circular to elliptical to propeller-shaped to square to pentagonal and finally to hexagonal. Ethylene glycol whirlpools formed shapes with no more than three sides.
Curiously, the polygons themselves rotated, although more slowly than their parent whirlpools.
Rotating fluids play important roles in systems ranging from industrial equipment, such as pumps, to atmospheric disturbances, such as tornadoes and hurricanes. Although the newfound shapes remain unexplained, Bohr says that their discovery may eventually lead scientists to a deeper understanding of fluids' rotational behaviors.
I am not in favor of putting any of my information "online". I don't move around nor do I need access to my information from remote locations. I have over 15 years of back emails that I maintain on my machine for reference and search. I want "control" over my information. I do not want it in the hands of someone else.
Reuse of sotware (as suggested by the original posting) is (in my opinion) greatly hampered by the use of C/C++ and systems that are not modular based. By "module" I mean what Niklaus Wirth created, first with Modula and later with Oberon and Component Pascal. Only by having strick information hiding (which is the default in Oberon) can one hope to be able to paste and glue (reuse) software. The C/C++ default is the export everything. It is a white box. The Oberon default is to export nothing. It is a black box. Blackboxes are much easier and safer to use.
Slashdot Mirror
I am amazed that almost no one seems to be aware that Dr Wirth is 3 generations of software beyond his original Pascal.
He also created Modula, then Oberon and is now working on Project Oberon using Oberon-7.
The spin off company Oberon Microsystems created the framework BlackBox and a superset of Oberon called Component Pascal.
Component Pascal is now maintained by the user community and is open source.
http://blackboxframework.org/i...
I don't especially like Pascal but I love Component Pascal!
How about some technical comments, umh?
Does the watch have GPS (a necessary requirement)
or any other way of determining the location of the wearer?
There are quite a few (SkyGolf for one) that provide this functionality.
Just wondering if Apple can compete in that market.
Golf would be my choice.
Show me how far I am from the next hole.
We had one of the 3 armatures from King Kong in our closet for several years.
My brother, Jim Danforth, knew Ray Harryhausen and did similar puppet animation
in the '60, such as "When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth" and "The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao".
Harryhausen was a house hold word in our family.
Don't buy him a computer!!
When you are 7 years old you need to be outside experiencing the world and playing physical games with your friends, not sitting inside at a computer terminal.
The only reason I use Windows is because of BlackBox/Component Pascal.
BB only runs on Windows.
I reject all C syntax based computer languages.
The concise language specification for Component Pascal and its elegance
is a clear win for me.
When the compiler finds an error I want the caret to be placed precisely into the
document where the error occurs NOT into some other sub window specifying a
line number. That makes a very big difference in rapid development.
I feel sorry for all of you who have been raised on the VisualXXX development environment.
There are actually two answers:
programming in general or programming for the commercial web based market.
Your comments assume a commercial market.
However, I would suggest completely forgetting about PhP or SQL or Python or C/CC+ or Java. All of those languages do not get to the core of what constitutes good programming.
Only Nicklaus Wirth has endeavored to formulate precise syntax which is "As simple as possible, but not simple" for programming.
The evolution of his thinking can be found in the successive development of the languages:
Pascal, Modula, Oberon, Component Pascal, Oberon-7
Each has refined and strengthened the programming core.
I suggest that you start with the open source language Component Pascal and its development environment called BlackBox (everything is hidden unless you explicitly export it) produced by Oberon Microsystems Inc. http://www.oberon.ch/BlackBox
There is another downside that I just realized.
For quite a number of years my feet have been bothering me.
I think I have found the answer. Too much sitting!
I spend at least 8 hours a day at the computer sitting.
I have recently tried standing while typing (I am doing that now)
and the feet are slightly better. I believe the circulation to my
legs is restricted by constant pressure but then it probably
depends upon the "mass of the ass". I am quite thin,
weigh 142lbs and so do not have too much padding.
But this should be a general phenomena so recommend that
you frequently get up and walk around. I am in fairly good
shape for my age since I walk/run at mile a day. But the
sitting undoes that good work.
My world is far from black and white. But there are certain limits to behavior and killing is the worst that one can do. Too much violence, too much to the 'rails'. Stories and movies with substance used to have subtle content. Now anything goes and it seems that the writers are trying harder and harder to find things with "shock value" just to get your attention so that advertiser will earn money. Ah, greed. Love it!
(That's sarcasm if you didn't notice).
Good for Switzerland!
About time some morality was interjected into the present day culture.
Killing is bad. Depicting killing as a game is bad. Didn't your parents teach you that? If not then now is the time to learn it.
Component Pascal is a successor of Pascal which follows the evolutionary line:
Pascal=>Modula=>Oberon=>Component Pascal
Niklaus Wirth has spent his life designing clean succinct syntax and semantic systems.
If one wishes to truly understand computer programming without unnecessary baggage then
I would strongly recommend the BlackBox/Component Pascal development environment to a new student.
see
http://www.oberon.ch/blackbox.html
Scroll down to Free Download.
The total development environment is about 10MB
and comes with complete documentation and examples.
Enjoy
The languages from Niklaus Wirth (Pascal, Modula, Oberon, Component Pascal) adhere to Edsger Dijkstra's Weakest Precondition.
The C/C++ languages do not.
When you write a function you need to specify the weakest precondition on the inputs that will guarantee the post condition of the outputs. These preconditions need to be specified as guards that test the input for satisfaction with the preconditions.
Component Pascal ALWAYS checks array bounds (you can't turn it off) so you never can write to or read from unallocated memory.
It also has garbage collection that completely avoids dangling pointers.
Choose a good language and follow Dijkstra's principles and you code will be much better.
It is my understanding that patents were created to help disperse the information (invention) discovered.
Yes, they protect the inventor but everyone else gets to see exactly what they have created.
Patents don't last forever.
Now that we're talking about 'languages that invite bad coding practices'... Well, one of the best programming books I've read is 'Perl Best Practices'. Not only does it list out best practices but it tries to explain (well I might add) why you should code a certain way and why other ways aren't good to follow.
One of the habits I picked up from 'Perl Best Practices is:
instead of:
The else tends to get 'lost' when just following the closing bracket.
IF condition THEN
ELSE
END
#define IF if( ;}else{ ;}
#define THEN ){
#define ELSE
#define END
Since I was raised on Algol I find the
"IF THEN ELSE END" construct far easier to see and read.
I have mixed feelings on this topic.
With a BS and MS in physics I find programming to get in the way of what the physics is about.
On the other hand I have spent 40 years programming and find it forces one to clarify the ideas behind any area.
I was taught Algol-60 at Stanford from the computer science department. At that time the physics department did not require any programming.
The experience of Algol lead to SAIL (Stanford AI Language) and then MAINSAIL (Machine Independent SAIL) and later Oberon and now BlackBox/Component Pascal.
All of these languages were influenced by Nicklaus Wirth who taught at ETH Zurich. Dr. Wirth adopted from Albert Einstein the phrase "As simple as possible, but not simpler" as a slogan for the Oberon Language. Einstein got his undergraduate degree from ETH Zurich. So there have a beautiful blending of physics and computer science.
One needs to be able to think abstractly as well as concretely with physics. The ABSTRACT facility and Object Oriented aspects of Component Pascal aid here. But unlike Smalltalk one is not forced to use objects. One can get down to the machine level if need be using a CODE construct within the language.
Although I have seen but not used MathLab I believe such already written graphical facilities are a benefit. Why reinvent the wheel unless it is part of the learning process.
I whole heartedly reject the C/C++ class of languages as 'programming in a can'. Far, far, too complex and syntactically messy.
Keep it simple.
Spacecraft charge has long been a problem with satellites. The OGO IV satellite (circa 1968) was frequently negative due to the fact that the electron temperature in the ionosphere is higher than the ion temperature. As such there is a net electron flow to the satellite until its charge repels the electrons for a balanced +/- flow. But this is not always the case since the solar panels on the craft have exposed electrical contacts. The charging panels can drive electrons away from the craft and give (every once in a while) a net positive charge to the craft. Plasmas are tricky beasts. Simulations of the space environment on earth are frequently wrong.
Use a good language! That will reduce the complexity of your code greatly. Forget C/C++. You just can't write good code in those languages. I prefer BlackBox/Component Pascal. o Modular o Garbage collection o Great compiler that puts the cursor *at* the error in your text. o Development environment has compound documents for high quality publishable writing and the same document for source code. You can embed bitmap images to aid documentation of your code. o No make files! o No compiler switches! o No linker switches (no explicit linker)! o ABSTRACT and EXTENSIBLE data types for generalizable programming. o many other good features. Best regards, Doug Danforth
Although wonderfully elegant it seems more like a taxonomy of particles and fields rather than a theory of everything. What underlies and determines a "particle"? Why so many fields? I would think a theory of everything would be composed of a single field interacting with itself to give various configurations which would appear to be other fields and appear to be localized particles.
I vote for the original Oberon-0 operating system and programming language by Niklaus Wirth. That system used only 300K bytes. It includes the compiler, graphical user interface, documentation, file system, and more. The system is modular and strongly typed.
They are there. We just don't recognize the magnitude of the effects that they are generating. Perhaps "dark matter" is really their technology used to retain matter around a galaxy.
There is a real need. Whether the politics will support it is quite a different matter. First the need and then the solution.
The only way I can deal with spam is to use a white list.
If you are not on my white list you go into my trash.
This means that you need to find some other way to get my
attention before I will put you on my white list.
This is simply for self preservation since I receive over 250
spam messages a day!
Science News week of June 3, 2006; Vol. 169, No. 22 , p. 348 As waters part, polygons appear Peter Weiss Imagine a hurricane with an eye in the shape of a propeller amid the swirling clouds. Physicists have observed something almost as strange in whirlpools that they made by swirling liquids in a novel way. Within the whirlpools, they've seen three-blade-propeller shapes as well as regular polygons, including squares and hexagons. a7340_1457.jpg CURRENT EVENT. A whirlpool, viewed from above, takes a pentagonal shape just above the spinning platter that's causing the water to swirl. T. Jansson, et al./Physical Review Letters The behavior of liquids in rotating containers has long fascinated physicists. For instance, in a famous late-1600s study, Isaac Newton pondered why the surface of water in a rotating bucket becomes concave. In the new experiments, Tomas Bohr and his colleagues at the Technical University of Denmark in Lyngby observed liquids in a cylindrical, Plexiglas container that doesn't actually turn. Instead, a plate attached to a motor-driven shaft spins at up to 7 revolutions per second inside the container, while the vessel itself remains still. As expected, in experiments with water or with viscous ethylene glycol, the spinning platter swirled the liquid above it to create whirlpools. But the throats of those whirlpools tapered to surprising shapes at the platter's surface, the team reports in the May 5 Physical Review Letters. In the water experiments, those shapes transformed as speed increased, changing from circular to elliptical to propeller-shaped to square to pentagonal and finally to hexagonal. Ethylene glycol whirlpools formed shapes with no more than three sides. Curiously, the polygons themselves rotated, although more slowly than their parent whirlpools. Rotating fluids play important roles in systems ranging from industrial equipment, such as pumps, to atmospheric disturbances, such as tornadoes and hurricanes. Although the newfound shapes remain unexplained, Bohr says that their discovery may eventually lead scientists to a deeper understanding of fluids' rotational behaviors.
I am not in favor of putting any of my information "online". I don't move around nor do I need access to my information from remote locations. I have over 15 years of back emails that I maintain on my machine for reference and search. I want "control" over my information. I do not want it in the hands of someone else.
Reuse of sotware (as suggested by the original posting) is (in my opinion) greatly hampered by the use of C/C++ and systems that are not modular based. By "module" I mean what Niklaus Wirth created, first with Modula and later with Oberon and Component Pascal. Only by having strick information hiding (which is the default in Oberon) can one hope to be able to paste and glue (reuse) software. The C/C++ default is the export everything. It is a white box. The Oberon default is to export nothing. It is a black box. Blackboxes are much easier and safer to use.