Do significant numbers of universities really plan like that?
yes
L.
--
PPIG Discuss List (discuss@ppig.org)
Discuss admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Announce admin:
So I would be, frankly, astonished if it could be shown that
*everyone* is equally trainable in programming to a
professional standard, any more than it could be shown that
everyone could learn to be a professional golfer or a
professional artist or a professional mathematician or a
How does one prove that some people will *never* learn to program? All
possible approaches
have now been tried so there are no new innovations to develop?
Computer science has only been around for a bit over 50 years. In
evolutionary terms, that's way
too short a time to evolve a
1) If you don't know how computers work, you don't know how
compilers work. (Obviously!)
How is that obvious? I can certainly conceive of knowing how compilers work
without knowing how a computer works - there are processes involved that can be
explained by analogy without referring to
That former group has different motivations, I believe. What motivates those
super-hackers
who become obsessed with code and end up inventing something like Linux? What
motivates them?
... What motivates someone to pick up programming without any previous
background (and
without,
I have always thought that programming and painting were closely
related. (See the huge painting that Stanley Spencer was working on when
he died and you'll see clearly how he approached it - remarkably like
how most people approach software development)
This suggests the thread, what kind of
-Original Message-
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
On Behalf Of Frank Wales
Sent: 20 February 2006 14:25
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: PPIG Discuss
Subject: Re: PPIG discuss: C++0x
On 02/20/2006 12:42 PM, John Sturdy wrote:
And where does this fit in terms of the
Glasgow have a useful checklist for whether or not ethics approval is
needed :
http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~hcp/ethics/
L.
--
PPIG Discuss List (discuss@ppig.org)
Discuss admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/discuss
I'm also considering the question of how to measure the success of such a
trial. One possibility I considered, as the proposed course is in
preparation for the Sun Certification exam, is to split the group into two,
and have half of them leave the room for an ordinary (inactive) break
If those motivational trainers that businesses hire can get
the dumpy, bald guy from accounts to feel confident about
public speaking in a day, it can't be beyond the wit of
academics to pass such a skill on to CS students, can it?
It's tougher than you think and it is also a problem
I am hoping that the proposed semi-circular
layout of the class will help, as it will be quite difficult
for students to see anyone's easel except their own.
Difficult with large numbers of students perhaps.
Also, in
ordinary life-drawing classes I have found the flip-chart pad
to be a
-Original Message-
From: Nevin Liber [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: 06 February 2006 22:14
To: Lindsay Marshall
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; discuss@ppig.org
Subject: Re: PPIG discuss: Loop Bounds and Errors
On 31/01/06, Lindsay Marshall
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I would always
Lindsay is right - pencil anxiety is a big problem for
computer scientists when you ask them to pick one up in a public place.
I've encountered this even with groups of senior HCI
researchers, who are completely unable to sketch a proposal
for a user interface when given a pencil and paper.
How about a whiteboard? Does that hold the same horror for them?
The horror is performing in public I think. Look how nervous people most
people are at doing presentations. A white board would be even worse! I
have some ideas for using tablet PCs that might work for this though -
I'll try them
What Frank said.
L.
--
PPIG Discuss List (discuss@ppig.org)
Discuss admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Announce admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/announce
PPIG Discuss archive:
Once you've got anything you understand it reasonably deeply.
Have you taught anyone recently? Many students increasingly seem unable to
generalise from examples. They clearly understand and can explain the example,
but require them to use the principle set out in the example in a slightly
No response for my mail, yesterday, I had an interview,
and they asked the same question, How do you work under pressure.
The canonical, Internet-driven answer of course is to say that you use
David Allen's GTD methods
L.
The rubber plant Dijkstra stood in room 208 of the Computer
Laboratory, a room with about eight PhD students in it,
including Stuart Wray (I think it was his plant, but am not
sure) and myself. While we were fond of invoking The expert
programmer effect and the /idea/ of talking to
Here's a suggestion: have you tried *standing* while you work?
Famous standers include : George Bernard Shaw, Donald Rumsfeld and Radio 1 DJ
Chris Moyles. There has been a lot of discussion about working standing on
various weblogs recently.
L.
I music so much that I spent the last three years studying it
at university. Abba's pretty good for pop, but I have way more
Philip Glass, Ella Fitzgerald, Beethoven and Jerry Goldsmith
in my CD collection than Abba. I even have more
Iannis Xenakis and Wynton Marsalis.
But isn't Glass the
That is exactly what I thought - re the cubicles.
I cannot believe that there is any attachment to one
networked machine from
a set of identical termainals. Lodicrous.
Whilst I generally agree, let is not pretend that terminals are
identical. They just aren't - some are noisier, some
http://www.acm.org/sigchi/chi95/proceedings/intpost/tst_bdy.htm
Did this paper get mentioned?
L.
--
PPIG Discuss List ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Discuss admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Announce admin:
I have a tool that can enforce all the company coding standards I have
ever seen.
Looks pretty ?
L.
--
PPIG Discuss List ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Discuss admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Announce admin:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] said:
An interesting editor is at http://www.sourceinsight.com -- it has a
fairly extensive selection of options for formatting program text
[ ... ]
I downloaded this to try it and I don't think that I have ever come across such a user
unfriendly program in my life! It
I sent the wrong link yesterday. If you're really interested in reading
about a topic that may well not be the most important research topic in
programming, you should look at
http://iipdm.haifa.ac.il/case_alternation.pdf instead of the link I sent
yesterday.
Sorry, but how do any of us know
Now look at the actual pleasing and vastly improved result:
http://www.sourceinsight.com/features_files/Syntax-Formatting.gif
What would a typographic designer say, do we think?
The guys at Komodo described it as colourful.
They have pointed out to me that you *can* do lots of type tricks in
The one thing that hasn't come up so far is stropping. Stropping is of
course not flavour of the month now, but I grew up with it since I
started on IMP, a derivative of Atlas Autocode
(%BYTEINTEGERARRAYFUNCTIONSPEC which of course also could be written
%BYTE %INTEGER %ARRAY %FUNCTION %SPEC). It
One of the major obstacles is the Mr Grumpy critique. Not so
much if it ain't broke don't fix it, but rather it's broke,
but I don't want you to fix it because I want to keep my broken
one. These people will never change their tools, but maybe their
tools will change. Many innovations in
http://www.activestate.com/Products/Komodo/Komodo
This page describes it as :
The professional IDE for open source languages
ActiveState Komodo is the award-winning, professional integrated
development environment (IDE) for open source languages, providing a
powerful workspace for editing,
I'm afraid that each language has its own rules and conventions that
depend on what is already lexically allowed in those languages. For
example, in standard Prolog variables _must_ begin with a captial
letter and constants must begin with a lower case letter.
But once you know that it is
Are you serious?
I hope he is - I find things with underbars in them unreadable in the extreme - the
under_bar pulls the eye down by pretending to be some kind of weird descender or
something and makes things difficult to read.
L.
In fact, even if someone came up with a system that improved code readability 300%
and gave me a free tool that automatically did the
formatting, I wouldn't be interested - the cost of testing the tool to make
sure it wasn't screwing up the code would probably wipe
out any savings that
I don't know about any academic studies, but raw experience with first
years says that it is a lousy first programming language. (For my money,
of course, you can drop the word first from that sentence)
L.
- Automatic footer for [EMAIL PROTECTED] --
To
It's horrid for several reasons
1) We already have XML why do we need something that looks the same but uses slightly
different characters?
2) The brackets don't appear to nest.
L.
- Automatic footer for [EMAIL PROTECTED] --
To unsubscribe from this list, mail
Their logic for developing the new language seems to be that XML
is implicitly a tree-structured language, but they want to represent
things that aren't most easily shown as trees, such as overlapping,
parallel classifications of the same data. Their examples
are the Bible,
where you can
Clarity is subjective. Function and variable names that are
clear to one person, may be obscure in the eyes of another
person. We know from other venues that a topic is better
understood if different explanations of the topic is
provided. In my experience this also applies to source
Very definitely. The only problem I have is that I want ot
put UML diagrams into the documentation but none of the tools
I have found provide an easy way of doing this sensibly.
And a good thing too - UML is a bogus load of sticks and boxes.
L.
- Automatic footer for [EMAIL PROTECTED]
But that, friends, is the problem with comments. Code is
usually hard to read, comments easy.
No! 10.0e3 times no! I find code *MUCH* easier to read than comments.
People too often write entirely vague generalities in comments. If I
want to know what is happening I look at the code. The
Programmers *cannot* intuit from the code that modulus is a better
hash function when the denominator is prime. Sorry, they just can't.
Either they know it or they don't. The author can either leave those
that don't happen to know this fact clueless (in which case they are
liable to
I cannot but comment on comments and Dereks comments. Let me raise my
programming is a craft argument and suggest looking at other
disciplines. How many other craft disciplines have secondary notations
of this kind? (Thought clearly the interesting about programming as a
craft is that the
Wouldn't that describe any computer program?
Now you see why state machines are important!!
L.
- Automatic footer for [EMAIL PROTECTED] --
To unsubscribe from this list, mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] unsubscribe discuss
To join the announcements list, mail [EMAIL
People in this thread (me included!) have been talking about Maths and programming,
but a CS course is more than programming - there is a lot of theory as well and the
Maths that gets taught is really so that people can cope with things like formal
methods and analysis of algorithms and
I forgot automata theory. You really need to have a good grasp of
the whole state machine idea to solve many problems successfully.
Can you give an example of this?
Well, any situation where you are looking for some kind of input that
then determines the next thing that you do is in effect
I think Lindsay' answer is more along the lines of
'if you ask a man with a hammer to solve a problem he
will use a hammer'. That is, Lindsay approaches things
from an academic point of view.
To quote many politicians I refute this!!. In fact I don't approach
programming from an academic
2nd place after automata techniques for me would
probably be hashing, in all its various forms and
purposes. Not much of an underlying theory there,
but having a visceral feel for a variety of hash algorithms
and their uses is something I seem to reach for on
a regular basis.
Funnily
Umm, not true at all - a lot of the Colossus stuff could be
described
as non-quantative processing, even though its basis was largely
mathematical.
What is the Colossus stuff?
The Enigma cryptanalysis in WWII which is essentially statistical
pattern matching (he said glibly) across
I have found areas of knowledge that were of fairly general
use in a variety of programming situations, but they were
usually not mathematics. For example, an understanding of
automata is something I've relied on over and over again.
I forgot automata theory. You really need to have a good
And there is a lot of subtlety involved in scientific
research which is not at all obvious and which is not on your list.
Which renders it all unscientific in many people's eyes. (Which is why
it never gets mentioned in discussions of scientific method)
L.
- Automatic footer for [EMAIL
In scientific research you start with a hypothesis, which can
be a guess
based on intuition. Until you start trying things (and/or
reading about
what others have tried), you really don't know what's going on, and it
can be very hard to decide where to start.
In de-bugging things are
The paper:
http://psych.utoronto.ca/~muter/Abs1985.htm
suggests that for intermittent readers of unknown
orthographies, ideographs have much lower error rates than
alphabetic characters.
Without having looked at the paper..this sounds plausible but I would think that
it depends
This is symptomatic
for the entire field of debugging, which does not rest on a
scientific foundation, despite the fact that everybody agrees that
debugging must be done scientifically.
Um, why would you think that? I most definitely don't agree! There is nothing
scientific about the
(Of course the print statements usually supress the bug :-))
Which, of course, is another clue about the nature of the bug
(usually a buffer overrun or an uninitialized variable.)
Oh no, far more likely to be a compiler bug (in my experience anyway). They are the
really hard ones to find
Good grief, you all take such a rigourous approach to these things! How do we search
for subject X about which we know nothing?
Well these days we go to google and type in X and go from there. (That is *exactly*
what I do for almost everything now) At least I now know what categories X may
How about some of Hofstadter's work on letter spirit (or whatever it was
he calls it)?
L.
- Automatic footer for [EMAIL PROTECTED] --
To unsubscribe from this list, mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] unsubscribe discuss
To join the announcements list, mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
54 matches
Mail list logo
