Computer Science from the Bottom Up (2013)

Post by Ar-Curunir » Sun, Dec 25, 2016, 3:25 AM UTC

asimpletune wrote: post #81

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Computer science is not about computers; where does stuff like algorithms fit into this? What is a "true scottsman" of CS? Low level programmers? What about people that have pioneered the theory of computer science? The likes of Karp, Valiant, Cook, Blum, Vazirani, Papdimitriou, Micali, Goldwasser, Goldreich, Shamir, Rivest and etc.? I doubt these people know the inner workings of computers, but they have revolutioni…

Advances in algorithms are a fundamental starting point, but I think it's a common mistake to conflate the efficiency of an algorithm in the abstract sense to how those benefits are manifested in the applied sense. While true, all things held equal a new algorithm will advance the field, providing "gains" as you said, but it's false to assume that algorithms are more important than understand computer architecture, f…

Post by wfunction » Sun, Dec 25, 2016, 3:54 AM UTC

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #121

wfunction wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What about people that have pioneered the theory of computer science? The likes of Karp, Valiant, Cook, Blum, Vazirani, Papdimitriou, Micali, Goldwasser, Goldreich, Shamir, Rivest and etc.? > I doubt these people know the inner workings of computers ...wha...? This is so ridiculous of a claim that I can't even think of how to respond...

Why is it ridiculous? All that I named are theoretical computer scientists. They certainly have the ability to learn about the intricacies of computer architecture, but I highly doubt they know, for instance, how a multiplexer works in hardware. This is my impression from my interactions with some of them.

Post by taeric » Sun, Dec 25, 2016, 5:35 AM UTC

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #120

taeric wrote: post #103

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I wouldn't say it is the dynamism as much as the lack of control. Specifically, if you write your code non idiomatically and control all allocations, the languages probably gain a lot on speed. Unless you need inline assembly. Some lisps allow this. I find that taking these lessons to database access patterns helps a lot. Know your data access, and the data structure design has meaningful discourse. Don't know your a…

>Know your data access, and the data structure design has meaningful discourse. Don't know your access patterns? You are unable to pick the best one. Period. Pretty much: if you don't know the access patterns, draw up a naive implementation so you can figure them out. This is actually connected to one of the disadvantages of Lisp: because Lisp makes it so easy to draw up a naive datastructure based on LLs, it can tak…

Post by continuational » Sun, Dec 25, 2016, 8:40 AM UTC

ivoras wrote: post #104

delsarto wrote: post #91

Thanks, I wrote this! It was a bit of a different time, when docbook was the way to publish, when Itanium was the 64-bit architecture, things like go and rust didn't exist and we used bitkeeper. But most of it is still relevant, and despite acquiring 2 kids since I started still have some ideas. Yes yes, it's not Alan Turing-esque computer science. I have taught algorithms and data structures courses as well as opera…

Just as idle inquiry about the "CS" term, do you think the name "Computer science" would still apply (and did it always apply) to things such as CPU and OS architectures, the toolchain, etc - basically the subject of your e-book? I am under the impression that there's a distinction between "Computer Science", which is algorithm and data structure design and analysis, and "Computer Engineering" which is basically ever…

Post by ZenoArrow » Sun, Dec 25, 2016, 9:21 AM UTC

gravypod wrote: post #44

vvanders wrote: post #42

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I'd actually argue an FPGA/CPLD is a slightly better approach, simply because you have block memory that acts very much like "cache" and makes it abundant why system memory is so much slower. Since you have timing statistics it also makes it really easy to demonstrate pipelining and many other modern "quirks" of processors that have a large impact on performance.

The barrier to entry in the FPGA world is tooling and expression. If that hurdle is solved then I'd be all for it. It will usher a new era of electrical engineering design that is as cheap as software desgin making it practical for students to try EVERYTHING on their own. To conduct similar experiments as I have with computer in electronics (as I'd like to do one day so I can get to the same place I am in electronics…