Programming languages CAN be VERY cool. Maybe not by the benchmark of getting laid, but by the feeling of elegance and power that can arise from languages and frameworks that hand you new paradigms to play with. Languages should not merely be evaluated by their utilitarian function; there is an aesthetic component to it as well (though beauty/simplicity in a language can often yield great utilitarian benefits).
I just finished reading Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonagall. It had very similar ideas. She tied together some really interesting concepts about personal engagement and flow experiences (when we're at our most productive and self-forgetful). Flow happens when certain conditions are met: we're getting realtime feedback, we're right at the threshold of our own skill levels (being neither bored nor overwhelmed), we believe we can win, etc. This is covered in the research and writing of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (primarily his classic work, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience).
It's not entirely new territory. The Great Game of Business by Jack Stack (1994) made a great case for structuring business endeavors as mini-games. People love to outdo themselves. It invites a phenomenal amount of brilliance as people's goals go from vague to ultra-measurable. Case studies are presented where entire plants are transformed and everyone's ingenuity is invited, not just high-level planners. I think this ties into McGonagall's ideas about using theories of flow and personal engagement, informed by the wild success of gaming at rewarding players for overcoming essentially voluntary obstacles, to restructure reality in new and creative ways.
When I started reading the book, I was suspicious of its core premise. But I really do now believe that principles from game design can be, and is already being, used to restructure academic experience (look at Khan Academy and it's built-in reward systems for mastering material). Similar creative leaps await us in business and society as well.
I proposed to my wife on a geocaching expedition. I'd set up a fictitious geocache location (with a box full of mementos and photos and special stuff pertaining to us) in a secluded forest clearing. I modified the latitude and longitude in the HTML on the geocaching site screen scrape in order to fool her into thinking it was a legitimate geocaching site like any other. We "found" the cache together; she opened it up and saw all of our stuff in there, including the ring box, and was floored. I got down on one knee and proposed.
I thought it was somewhat geeky! But she liked it and it went well from there.
Look at the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology by David Allen. It's good at helping you keep track of all the stuff that's going on.
Also, when I feel like my head is getting too cluttered, I do a brain dump into MindJet's MindManager software. It can help capture many disparate pieces of information visually and the process can yield some mental clarity . . .
Also, I'd add up the results of the.NET and C# searches - in this context they might be considered as interchangeable, as C# is the most popular implementation language for.NET development.
It was so surreal to see this as the most recent headline on Slashdot - two minutes before, I'd finished listening to the audio version of "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks," which touches on issues surrounding genetic research and the unfortunate incursion of capitalism into tissue storage and research. The book itself is a fascinating mix of science and history, but the Afterword is all about the commercialism of genetic research and the obstacles it's introducing to scientific progress. Who owns human tissues and the research advances that come from them: the patients, the researchers, or the scientific community and the world? More information about the book can be found here: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
I was dismayed to learn that it would cost millions to test one individual for all known genetic diseases, not because of inherent costs of the technology but because of all the patents and licensing fees. I hope that today's positive ruling cascades in positive ways to other realms of gene patenting and unthrottles scientific progress.
I had just read about this possibility today in this book, a fascinating compendium of mini-essays by leading thinkers about scientific or social developments that may be around the corner. Existing tests for biological organisms are geared towards a working asssumption that life forms will be part of the basic, familiar biological tree that we are based on. A "shadow biosphere" was discussed as something that could potentially be an alternative hierarchy of life, so unfamiliar that we haven't understood how to look for it even though it could be relatively populous in certain niche areas of the earth.
Finding an alternative pathway to the evolution of complex life forms could affect our perception of how common life is in the universe and could be a stunning treasure trove of discovery and insight for biologists.
What's up with the "inputdev" tag? Are we still working with 8-character limits?:/ I know this is a geek site, but I find it so annoying - why can't it be "inputdevices" or something.
I've seen a lot of benefit in developers bringing in a projector and working together on design/code with a wall-sized screen that they can both look at. Only one person might be manning the keyboard and mouse, but it's so much more conducive to longterm discussion than when multiple people crane over a shared monitor, even a nice widescreen. An afternoon of great collaboration can happen that way . . .
I've always found that stepping through the debugger at runtime is a decent way to start making sense of a large code base. Easier, anyway, than trying to read static code printouts. Just set a breakpoint at a point of interest, fire up the application, and use it as a starting point. You get a sense for program flow and it's a great way to generate questions--lots of them. (What does class SuchAndSuch do? It looks like the application is handling remoting in such-and-such a fashion; is that right?) You can also choose one aspect of the architecture and selectively ignore or step over other aspects, building up your understanding one aspect at a time. In my case, with Visual Studio as a development environment, I can hover the mouse cursor over variable names to see their current values. In the case of variables of a certain type, like datasets or XML structures, I can use realtime visualizers to browse the contents and get a much better feel for what's going on.
If there's no one at your company that can help answer your questions and bring you up to speed, I feel for you - your employers ought to know enough to give you some extra margin. It can be very hard to take over a large code base without some human-to-human handover time.
Also, is it an object-oriented system? I assume that it's not, based on your post, but you don't say either way. If it is, the important aspects of program flow often live in the interactions between classes and objects and the business logic is decentralized. OO is great, but it can be harder to reverse-engineer business logic because it's distributed among various classes. A debugger that lets you step through running code is almost essential in this case.
> Is it legitimate to use source code that's publicly available but doesn't fall under any particular license?
Of course it is. This kind of thing happens all the time.
Frankly, I'm glad you don't work for us. The fact that you would consider "rewriting" code that works well just because it was written by someone external to your company doesn't speak well for your sense of business priorities or usage of time.
> The original author didn't attach any particular license to the code.
In the sense that it's been served up to me, for free, I consider some of the ingredients of the mashups I described to be "my data" - my Netflix and Blockbuster queues, my friends lists on blogging sites (along with the entries they've written), etc. I'm not suggesting using some backdoor to take stuff merchants want to sell, and make it free.
I can already perform much of the above aggregation myself - manually and for free.
If you're talking about someone investing development time for a cool browser plug-in or aggregator website that automated it for me, though . . . well, I know that I for one wouldn't mind kicking in some $$$ for something that useful.
In content aggregation lies all of my excitement about the future of the web (if people are allowed to continue being innovative and aren't prevented by heel-dragging by legal departments).
I don't even care if the aggregation happens server-side or browser-side. I want to be able to view a book product page on Amazon and click a "place local library hold" button. I want to be able to view my LiveJournal Friends page and have a superimposed queue and "recently watched" displays for those folks who are also my Netflix friends. Or current weather reports for those friends' locations. Fun stuff. I want to be able to stumble across an old news story and have a "there are 117 comments when this story was posted to Slashdot five months ago" notification.
There is so much potential here for crossover - and it's all data that already exists! Crosslinking through simple knowledge of "which person on one service is which person on another service" - and "which product on one service is which product on another service" - would open so many doors. I hope legal departments don't keep preemptively closing them. To me, this is what would excite me if it were true about "Web 2.0" - beyond just simple pretty, AJAX-enabled user interfaces. Although those are cool, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Programming languages CAN be VERY cool. Maybe not by the benchmark of getting laid, but by the feeling of elegance and power that can arise from languages and frameworks that hand you new paradigms to play with. Languages should not merely be evaluated by their utilitarian function; there is an aesthetic component to it as well (though beauty/simplicity in a language can often yield great utilitarian benefits).
lol!
(sorry for the duplicate; when I'd posted before I hadn't realized I wasn't logged in)
I just finished reading Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonagall. It had very similar ideas. She tied together some really interesting concepts about personal engagement and flow experiences (when we're at our most productive and self-forgetful). Flow happens when certain conditions are met: we're getting realtime feedback, we're right at the threshold of our own skill levels (being neither bored nor overwhelmed), we believe we can win, etc. This is covered in the research and writing of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (primarily his classic work, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience).
It's not entirely new territory. The Great Game of Business by Jack Stack (1994) made a great case for structuring business endeavors as mini-games. People love to outdo themselves. It invites a phenomenal amount of brilliance as people's goals go from vague to ultra-measurable. Case studies are presented where entire plants are transformed and everyone's ingenuity is invited, not just high-level planners. I think this ties into McGonagall's ideas about using theories of flow and personal engagement, informed by the wild success of gaming at rewarding players for overcoming essentially voluntary obstacles, to restructure reality in new and creative ways.
When I started reading the book, I was suspicious of its core premise. But I really do now believe that principles from game design can be, and is already being, used to restructure academic experience (look at Khan Academy and it's built-in reward systems for mastering material). Similar creative leaps await us in business and society as well.
I proposed to my wife on a geocaching expedition. I'd set up a fictitious geocache location (with a box full of mementos and photos and special stuff pertaining to us) in a secluded forest clearing. I modified the latitude and longitude in the HTML on the geocaching site screen scrape in order to fool her into thinking it was a legitimate geocaching site like any other. We "found" the cache together; she opened it up and saw all of our stuff in there, including the ring box, and was floored. I got down on one knee and proposed.
I thought it was somewhat geeky! But she liked it and it went well from there.
Look at the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology by David Allen. It's good at helping you keep track of all the stuff that's going on. Also, when I feel like my head is getting too cluttered, I do a brain dump into MindJet's MindManager software. It can help capture many disparate pieces of information visually and the process can yield some mental clarity . . .
All the stuff coming out of the .NET development groups is pretty awesome - LINQ, WPF, etc.
Also, I'd add up the results of the .NET and C# searches - in this context they might be considered as interchangeable, as C# is the most popular implementation language for .NET development.
It was so surreal to see this as the most recent headline on Slashdot - two minutes before, I'd finished listening to the audio version of "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks," which touches on issues surrounding genetic research and the unfortunate incursion of capitalism into tissue storage and research. The book itself is a fascinating mix of science and history, but the Afterword is all about the commercialism of genetic research and the obstacles it's introducing to scientific progress. Who owns human tissues and the research advances that come from them: the patients, the researchers, or the scientific community and the world? More information about the book can be found here: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
I was dismayed to learn that it would cost millions to test one individual for all known genetic diseases, not because of inherent costs of the technology but because of all the patents and licensing fees. I hope that today's positive ruling cascades in positive ways to other realms of gene patenting and unthrottles scientific progress.
How can unobtainium not be a tag?!
I had just read about this possibility today in this book, a fascinating compendium of mini-essays by leading thinkers about scientific or social developments that may be around the corner. Existing tests for biological organisms are geared towards a working asssumption that life forms will be part of the basic, familiar biological tree that we are based on. A "shadow biosphere" was discussed as something that could potentially be an alternative hierarchy of life, so unfamiliar that we haven't understood how to look for it even though it could be relatively populous in certain niche areas of the earth.
Finding an alternative pathway to the evolution of complex life forms could affect our perception of how common life is in the universe and could be a stunning treasure trove of discovery and insight for biologists.
Storyline? Like Tetris?
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/30431
What's up with the "inputdev" tag? Are we still working with 8-character limits? :/ I know this is a geek site, but I find it so annoying - why can't it be "inputdevices" or something.
I've seen a lot of benefit in developers bringing in a projector and working together on design/code with a wall-sized screen that they can both look at. Only one person might be manning the keyboard and mouse, but it's so much more conducive to longterm discussion than when multiple people crane over a shared monitor, even a nice widescreen. An afternoon of great collaboration can happen that way . . .
Are songs discovered or written?
I've always found that stepping through the debugger at runtime is a decent way to start making sense of a large code base. Easier, anyway, than trying to read static code printouts. Just set a breakpoint at a point of interest, fire up the application, and use it as a starting point. You get a sense for program flow and it's a great way to generate questions--lots of them. (What does class SuchAndSuch do? It looks like the application is handling remoting in such-and-such a fashion; is that right?) You can also choose one aspect of the architecture and selectively ignore or step over other aspects, building up your understanding one aspect at a time. In my case, with Visual Studio as a development environment, I can hover the mouse cursor over variable names to see their current values. In the case of variables of a certain type, like datasets or XML structures, I can use realtime visualizers to browse the contents and get a much better feel for what's going on.
If there's no one at your company that can help answer your questions and bring you up to speed, I feel for you - your employers ought to know enough to give you some extra margin. It can be very hard to take over a large code base without some human-to-human handover time.
Also, is it an object-oriented system? I assume that it's not, based on your post, but you don't say either way. If it is, the important aspects of program flow often live in the interactions between classes and objects and the business logic is decentralized. OO is great, but it can be harder to reverse-engineer business logic because it's distributed among various classes. A debugger that lets you step through running code is almost essential in this case.
Hey, I'd vote for you.
> Is it legitimate to use source code that's publicly available but doesn't fall under any particular license?
Of course it is. This kind of thing happens all the time.
Frankly, I'm glad you don't work for us. The fact that you would consider "rewriting" code that works well just because it was written by someone external to your company doesn't speak well for your sense of business priorities or usage of time.
> The original author didn't attach any particular license to the code.
I think that says it all.
Agreed.
So in the future, "I rock!" will be a scientifically verifiable claim!
I wish they'd ban boredom next. I can't stand Second Life!
In the sense that it's been served up to me, for free, I consider some of the ingredients of the mashups I described to be "my data" - my Netflix and Blockbuster queues, my friends lists on blogging sites (along with the entries they've written), etc. I'm not suggesting using some backdoor to take stuff merchants want to sell, and make it free.
What bills?
I can already perform much of the above aggregation myself - manually and for free.
If you're talking about someone investing development time for a cool browser plug-in or aggregator website that automated it for me, though . . . well, I know that I for one wouldn't mind kicking in some $$$ for something that useful.
In content aggregation lies all of my excitement about the future of the web (if people are allowed to continue being innovative and aren't prevented by heel-dragging by legal departments).
I don't even care if the aggregation happens server-side or browser-side. I want to be able to view a book product page on Amazon and click a "place local library hold" button. I want to be able to view my LiveJournal Friends page and have a superimposed queue and "recently watched" displays for those folks who are also my Netflix friends. Or current weather reports for those friends' locations. Fun stuff. I want to be able to stumble across an old news story and have a "there are 117 comments when this story was posted to Slashdot five months ago" notification.
There is so much potential here for crossover - and it's all data that already exists! Crosslinking through simple knowledge of "which person on one service is which person on another service" - and "which product on one service is which product on another service" - would open so many doors. I hope legal departments don't keep preemptively closing them. To me, this is what would excite me if it were true about "Web 2.0" - beyond just simple pretty, AJAX-enabled user interfaces. Although those are cool, too.