Re: [silk] The future of learning?
I can hardly call myself a programmer but since I have written programs that are of some use to one or two (literally) people I suppose I must plead guilty. I learned BASIC on a handheld 7 in x 2.5 in TRS 80 Radio Shack computer with something like 1.5 kb memory. I bought that machine for 40 Pounds Sterling in 1985 in a grey, rainy town called Hull, England, having earned an extra 40 Pounds signing two death certificates. Here's an image http://oldcomputers.net/pics/trs80pc1.jpg I actually taught myself BASIC in 1989 and was thrilled to discover that BASIC worled like a charm on my first PC bought in 1991. My most sucessful programs were 1. A calculator 2. An elementary math (addition, subtraction, multiplication) testing program that generated sums for my then 5 year old daughter 3. A numbers to words program for a child to learn how to spell numbers correctly 4. An expert system to diagnose abdominal pain I then gave up for over a decade - but in the last year or so I have been toying with some elementary programming applying game theory to a model of a radical Islamic society where the ratio of moderates, radicals and non Muslism can be varied to get a score. shiv
Re: [silk] The future of learning?
On Sat, Jun 11, 2011 at 4:21 PM, Biju Chacko biju.cha...@gmail.com wrote: Funnily enough, many of the CS guys I hung out with back then never seemed to love the machines the way I did and ended up getting MBAs and leaving the industry. Another data point: my sister is my only sibling to actually have a CS degree. She's also the only one who's not in IT -- she works in an ad agency. It seems formal study is a sure shot way to kill any interest in a subject. I disagree, or perhaps am a counterexample. When I first started studying CS, there was no CS program we were part of either the Applied Physics and Information Science department (at UCSD) or part of Applied Math (at Berkeley.) While I also dropped out, I did formally study both CS and Math (in particular abstract algebra and number theory) and I still love both. I know a number of the luminaries from that age still love CS and would work in the field even without pay. -- Charles
Re: [silk] The future of learning?
Phone mail, so pardon top post. Formal education needn't kill the love of a subject. I formally learnt archaeology - both the theory and the practice - and my love for the discipline and the study has only gone up. So much so that I'm now helping organise a world-wide collaborative arch event. I also learnt documentary film production formally and it is now my day job. Of course, as in all things, YMMV. C (pardon, please, phone mail) On 6/11/11, Biju Chacko biju.cha...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 11:13 PM, Udhay Shankar N ud...@pobox.com wrote: This list contains a large number of self-taught programmers. How did you get started, and how did you get to a moderate level of skill? (If you want to talk about what happened after that, great, but I am more interested in the first two stages) When I was studying architecture, I generally found the archi crowd's khadi-clad, I-am-an-artist-this-is-my-art conceit insufferable so I started hanging out with a bunch of CS guys. I started playing video games on their computers, progressed to cracking them in order to cheat and then writing batch files for minor automation. I soon realised that writing code gave me a better rush than the games -- and that I was getting no rush whatsoever from architecture. I dropped out, scrounged a job writing VB code for an ERP company and the rest, as they say, is history. Funnily enough, many of the CS guys I hung out with back then never seemed to love the machines the way I did and ended up getting MBAs and leaving the industry. Another data point: my sister is my only sibling to actually have a CS degree. She's also the only one who's not in IT -- she works in an ad agency. It seems formal study is a sure shot way to kill any interest in a subject. -- b -- Sent from my mobile device http://www.uk.linkedin.com/in/chandrachoodan http://www.flickr.com/photos/ravages http://www.selectiveamnesia.org/ +919884467463
Re: [silk] The future of learning?
On Sat, Jun 11, 2011 at 11:51:57AM +0530, Biju Chacko wrote: It seems formal study is a sure shot way to kill any interest in a subject. That possibly happened to me with chemistry. I didn't lose the interest to mess in the lab, as most chemists who left the field apparently did. But the actual realities are a bit disillusioning, the same, presumably, as in CS. There are some extremely interesting and important areas to be done both in chemistry (nanotechnology, renewable energy and resources) and CS (artificial intelligence, neural emulation, physical modelling, artificial reality) if one didn't have to pay the bills. Humanity as a whole has some pretty disappointing priorities, unfortunately.
Re: [silk] The future of learning?
On Saturday 11 Jun 2011 4:40:44 pm Eugen Leitl wrote: Humanity as a whole has some pretty disappointing priorities, unfortunately. Here is a post I made on Silk in 1998 http://archives.aox.org/archives/silk/13492/thread shiv
Re: [silk] The future of learning?
At 2011-06-11 18:28:43 +0530, ud...@pobox.com wrote: http://archives.aox.org/archives/silk/13492/thread I don't think the aox silk archive is still alive. What was there still works, and in particular, that link works. I never did subscribe it to live silk messages. I can't remember why not. Maybe I will, after I'm back home. I suppose my personal archive will fill in the gaps between my last import and now. It was started as a demo of crab's archiving software and didn't survive his parting ways with the company. That is (unintentionally, I'm sure) very misleading. I didn't part ways with the company, we (that is me and the other co-founder) decided to shut it down, though we still maintain the software by ourselves. The archive is still meant to work, though I don't pay as much attention to it these days as I used to. -- ams
Re: [silk] The future of learning?
On 11-Jun-11 6:36 PM, Abhijit Menon-Sen wrote: http://archives.aox.org/archives/silk/13492/thread I don't think the aox silk archive is still alive. What was there still works, and in particular, that link works. That link works now, and didn't (for me) 5 minutes ago. Where's my tinfoil hat? It was started as a demo of crab's archiving software and didn't survive his parting ways with the company. That is (unintentionally, I'm sure) very misleading. I didn't part ways with the company, we (that is me and the other co-founder) decided to shut it down, though we still maintain the software by ourselves. The archive is still meant to work, though I don't pay as much attention to it these days as I used to. Heh. Noted. Udhay -- ((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
[silk] Influence of silklisters in India
Hi all, Came across this tweet, was pleasantly suprised that a few silklisters made to the top Pinstorm India Influencers http://www.pinstorm.com/ii/ Impact of early adoptors on society ? Regards Anish Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device
Re: [silk] The future of learning?
On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 10:43 AM, Udhay Shankar N ud...@pobox.com wrote: This list contains a large number of self-taught programmers. How did you get started, and how did you get to a moderate level of skill? (If you want to talk about what happened after that, great, but I am more interested in the first two stages) My introduction to computers was in the middle of high school. Our curriculum (introduced to high schoolers for the first time in the late 80's) included flowcharts, BASIC and Fortran and about an hour of hands-on computer time a week. I voraciously devoured any books on computers (many of questionable value, I later realized) that I could lay my hands on. I also found that I had a natural appetite for coding and managed to squeeze in an extra hour a day of hands-on computer time in the school lab (30 minutes in the morning before school started, 30 minutes during lunch). Soon I knew more than my poor teachers and they left me alone to play with the computers in the lab as long as I did not ask any difficult questions in class. I wrote a handful of primitive games, but my education was highly unstructured. In addition to an hour-a-day of hands-on programming, I also wrote a lot of programs on paper. When I went to university I naturally chose Computer Science as my major. However, I was very unhappy with my classmates (who were extremely socially-inept nerds or rich brats who could get a seat in college through daddy's influence). After a disastrous third semester (when I went to class 50% of the time) I balked at the idea of spending 2+ years in their company and changed majors. Changing my major meant that I had almost no access to computers till my final year of college. At the end of the third year of college I studied C and Unix at one of the computer training institutes in Madras. I was extremely lucky because I had an excellent teacher (unlike 99.9% of these computer institute teachers). The first half of the class was basic programming with C. The second half of the class was introduction to various concepts and then writing the unix toolchain (cd, ls, cat, diff, etc.) from scratch using the C we had learned. In my final year of college one of my friends who has gone to the US to do his masters snail mailed me print outs of the Jargon file and I suddenly realized that there were others like me out there and that we had a cool name for who we are: Hackers. Thaths -- Marge: Quick, somebody perform CPR! Homer: Umm (singing) I see a bad moon rising. Marge: That's CCR! Homer: Looks like we're in for nasty weather. Sudhakar Chandra Slacker Without Borders
Re: [silk] Influence of silklisters in India
On Sat, Jun 11, 2011 at 8:08 AM, Suresh Ramasubramanian sur...@hserus.net wrote: mahesh murthy is a silklister .. As is Jace. Thaths -- Marge: Quick, somebody perform CPR! Homer: Umm (singing) I see a bad moon rising. Marge: That's CCR! Homer: Looks like we're in for nasty weather. Sudhakar Chandra Slacker Without Borders
Re: [silk] Influence of silklisters in India
On Saturday 11 June 2011 08:46 PM, Thaths wrote: On Sat, Jun 11, 2011 at 8:08 AM, Suresh Ramasubramanian sur...@hserus.net wrote: mahesh murthy is a silklister .. As is Jace. As are Sidin, Gautam (gkjohn) Deepak Shenoy. --Venkat
Re: [silk] Influence of silklisters in India
Venkat Mangudi [11/06/11 21:07 +0530]: On Saturday 11 June 2011 08:46 PM, Thaths wrote: On Sat, Jun 11, 2011 at 8:08 AM, Suresh Ramasubramanian sur...@hserus.net wrote: mahesh murthy is a silklister .. As is Jace. As are Sidin, Gautam (gkjohn) Deepak Shenoy. though .. twitter != social networking ..
Re: [silk] The future of learning?
This list contains a large number of self-taught programmers. How did you get started, and how did you get to a moderate level of skill? (If you want to talk about what happened after that, great, but I am more interested in the first two stages) (Delurking for just a bit to take a trip down memory lane) * I wrote my first bits of code in biweekly 1-hour computer periods at school somewhere around 1994-95 when our school still had BBC Micros[1], with amber colored CRT screens. We would be queued up, 5 people to a computer each taking turns playing a game called Block Blitz, except when my turn came I would switch to the a BASIC interpreter, and start writing simple programs. Then I learnt about GOTO, and then about GOSUB. Rest as they say is history. Till this day, I cannot get myself to enjoy playing games on a computer * Over the next few years, my desire to code could not keep up with the amount of time I could get in front of a computer (and they were too expensive to have one at home at that time). So I wrote thousands of lines on paper, and stepped through them several times in my head until I was absolutely sure I had got it right. I would then get it typed at my dad's office, and store them on a floppy disk for running them in the school lab. Ironically, the lack of a coding machine at my disposal helped me build up the discipline of debugging in my head. * I clearly remember, back in 1996-97 reading about something mysterious called classes in a C++ book I borrowed from the computers section of British Council Library. Then I picked up the book next to it which turned out to be a Modula 2 [2] book talking about data structures like stacks, queues and trees (I had a hard time with trees). I finally decided to go in serial order, working my way from the top shelf. Apart from programming, I also ended up reading about things like FoxPro database software, and Symphony spreadsheets[3] * I learnt Pascal in high school/junior college. Around this time, some people decided to mutate my first name to Debug because I loved to go around the lab looking at people's code and pointing out where they were making a mistake. Debugging code you have not written yourself can be a great way to build up good intuition. * I made the terrible mistake of studying CS in what is probably the worst place to do so in the developed world *. It probably even lead to a regression in my abilities as a programmer. Most of the people in my CS class now work as management consultants, bankers or IT Managers. The only thing good about university was that I had my own computer, and I spent countless hours building Gentoo Linux from source, reading Samba manuals to make my computer interoperate with the University network, and other fun stuff. * Since 2004, I have spent a significant amount of time trying to undo 4 years of crappy education. 17 years since I wrote my first program, I still I feel I am very new to this coding thing and have a lot to learn. That is probably what, in the end still keeps me passionate. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modula-2 [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Symphony_for_DOS * The university is located on a tiny island called Singapore
Re: [silk] The future of learning?
On Sat, Jun 11, 2011 at 06:52:00PM +0530, Udhay Shankar N wrote: That link works now, and didn't (for me) 5 minutes ago. Where's my tinfoil hat? It showed three different messages on three subsequent visits. The third one was the real thing and it settled on that hereafter. I'm sure cookies were involved.
Re: [silk] The future of learning?
On 10-Jun-11, at 11:13 PM, Udhay Shankar N wrote: [snip] This list contains a large number of self-taught programmers. How did you get started, and how did you get to a moderate level of skill? I played a demo of a then-current game: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/05/bill-gates-and-donkey-bas.html I was told that someone had written this fantastic game in a Computer Language that resembled English, and I knew I had found my calling. Subsequently, the most important years of my self-directed programming education were spent reading and writing code in school notebooks, much the same as Deepak. Bottom line is, I became a programmer because of Bill Gates and possibly the worst game ever written for DOS. -Taj.
Re: [silk] The future of learning?
On Jun 10, 2011, at 10:43 AM, Udhay Shankar N wrote: This list contains a large number of self-taught programmers. How did you get started, and how did you get to a moderate level of skill? (If you want to talk about what happened after that, great, but I am more interested in the first two stages) As a child, I lived in a town of a few hundred people a long distance from civilization. I was also consistently a few grades ahead of my peers which left the rural school administrators at a loss for what to do with me. The government issued each school a new Apple II computer, for which my school had little use. They sat me in front of it with no particular instruction and let me burn school hours playing with it. I started with a game or two. Then I discovered Logo and Basic, which were infinitely more interesting. I bootstrapped from there. Like others, I most of my software was written with pencil. Moderate skill was developed through an inordinate amount of iteration. I spent most of my free time figuring out how to design a diverse range of programs. There was no web, so I had virtually no interaction with programmers or programming literature until I moved to Silicon Valley to study chemical engineering in 1991. Before then, I reinvented quite a bit of computer science in my spare time, often badly, but became a productive programmer for my own purposes. Many years later it turns out that inventing a lot of known computer science was not the waste of time it sounds like. Moving to Silicon Valley was a bit of a culture shock. Compared to everyone else, I had an odd approach and uneven computer science knowledge, ignorant in some areas and advanced in other areas. I very rapidly filled in the gaps and discovered that I had unusual talent for the subject matter. The rest is history.
Re: [silk] Influence of silklisters in India
On Sat, Jun 11, 2011 at 5:47 PM, Suresh Ramasubramanian sur...@hserus.net wrote: though .. twitter != social networking .. I don't see @ShashiTharoor. I believe he's pretty influential on twitter in India, isn't he? Cheeni
Re: [silk] Influence of silklisters in India
On 11 Jun 2011, at 21:17, Srini RamaKrishnan che...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Jun 11, 2011 at 5:47 PM, Suresh Ramasubramanian sur...@hserus.net wrote: though .. twitter != social networking .. I don't see @ShashiTharoor. I believe he's pretty influential on twitter in India, isn't he? Cheeni You don't know this yet. But I'm totally influencing this conversation.
Re: [silk] Influence of silklisters in India
You don't know this yet. But I'm totally influencing this conversation. yes u are, btw congrats on getting on that list ;) Anish Mohammed Twitter: anishmohammed http://uk.linkedin.com/in/anishmohammed On 11 Jun 2011, at 21:20, Sidin Vadukut sidin.vadu...@gmail.com wrote:
Re: [silk] Influence of silklisters in India
The jackasses who bray the loudest get to become the lions of twitter .. --Original Message-- From: Srini RamaKrishnan Sender: silklist-bounces+suresh=hserus@lists.hserus.net To: silklist@lists.hserus.net ReplyTo: silklist@lists.hserus.net Subject: Re: [silk] Influence of silklisters in India Sent: Jun 12, 2011 01:45 On Sat, Jun 11, 2011 at 5:47 PM, Suresh Ramasubramanian sur...@hserus.net wrote: though .. twitter != social networking .. I don't see @ShashiTharoor. I believe he's pretty influential on twitter in India, isn't he? Cheeni -- srs (blackberry)
Re: [silk] Influence of silklisters in India
On Sunday 12 June 2011 02:18 AM, Anish Mohammed wrote: You don't know this yet. But I'm totally influencing this conversation. yes u are, btw congrats on getting on that list ;) You mean, *this* list, don't you? ;) --V
Re: [silk] Influence of silklisters in India
On Sunday 12 Jun 2011 1:45:55 am Srini RamaKrishnan wrote: I don't see @ShashiTharoor. I believe he's pretty influential on twitter in India, isn't he? No need. Atul Chitnis is there. Silklisters are in august company. shiv
Re: [silk] Influence of silklisters in India
ss [12/06/11 07:46 +0530]: On Sunday 12 Jun 2011 1:45:55 am Srini RamaKrishnan wrote: I don't see @ShashiTharoor. I believe he's pretty influential on twitter in India, isn't he? No need. Atul Chitnis is there. Silklisters are in august company. [choke]
