I noted that the one question in the video was asked by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kahan , the main architect of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_754 floating point. Both Lamport and Kahan are Turing Award winners. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Lamport
If You're Not Writing a Program, Don't Use a Programming Language [video]
191–200 of 288 posts
Re: If You're Not Writing a Program, Don't Use a Programming Language [video]
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
Computers are still imperative, so all functional code is arguably syntactic sugar over that core causing a lot of leaky abstractions to show up all over the place. I think the problem with Object-oriented programming is it's taught to soon. Start with Imperative then Functional then toss object oriented into your senior year.
A ton of problems in software engineering, I am convinced (and isn't wild generalization one of the marks of our field! I at least want to own my own hypocrisy here) are communication problems. Nearly all the interesting ones, anyway. And one of them is axioms no-one ever communicates . I've worked with programmers with at least three markedly different axiomatic bases, for want of some less pretentious – and less ex…
So where do Smalltalkers and Lispers go?
Re: If You're Not Writing a Program, Don't Use a Programming Language [video]
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
Computers are still imperative, so all functional code is arguably syntactic sugar over that core causing a lot of leaky abstractions to show up all over the place. I think the problem with Object-oriented programming is it's taught to soon. Start with Imperative then Functional then toss object oriented into your senior year.
> Computers are still imperative "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." — (Mis)attributed to Edsger Dijkstra, 1970.
> As a result, primarily in the U.S., the topic became prematurely known as "computer science"---which actually is like referring to surgery as "knife science"---and it was firmly implanted in people's minds that computing science is about machines and their peripheral equipment.
Edsger W Dijkstra. Mathematicians and computing scientists: The cultural gap. Abacus, 4(4): 26–31, June 1987. ISSN 0724-6722. URL http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=25596.25598.
Which is similar in spirit to the contested quote, and predates by a few years any of the references on Wikiquote.
Re: If You're Not Writing a Program, Don't Use a Programming Language [video]
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sort of. Except I don't think there's a such thing as "high-assurance AI/ML". Put simply for the audience here. The goal is to have the whole stack from top to bottom be as predictable and deterministic as possible. There's a layer of it (the AI/ML bits) which is necessarily probabilistic. That's by design. It's how it all works. All the layers below that today are currently terrifyingly probabilistic. It's difficult…
Are you sure, such thing as "high-assurance AI/ML" doesn't exist? Are you an expert in AI, with many years of experience building products with AI technology?
I'm not an expert in AI, but as you can imagine I have to interact with a lot of people who are. What I do know is what it means to be able to do end-to-end verification and it seems fairly antithetical to the basis of machine learning which has an open-ended failure domain. If you could write an AI as a total program, it would cease to be probabilistic. It would become propositional, but would also seem to cease to be writable and computationally tractable. As it would need to encode all possible states of all possible features of all relevant domains and all possible things that can interact with each of those things and what their effects would be.
Though, I'm happy to be proven wrong here as it would make me a lot less nervous about the future were there a way to legitimately assure the artificial driver in an AV won't fail in emergent ways, or at all.
Re: If You're Not Writing a Program, Don't Use a Programming Language [video]
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
"A lot of the new people"
Ah, thank you for disambiguating the pronoun 'they' whose reference wasn't clear as you provided no antecedent. EDIT: Heh, kind of ironic really. A pronoun without an antecedent is like a variable in a dynamic programming language whose context isn't clear.
I guess I am a dynamic writer but a strongly typed programmer :-)
Re: If You're Not Writing a Program, Don't Use a Programming Language [video]
#196I wasn't exposed to spreadsheets until a few years into college back around 1996 or 1997 maybe (I had been programming in C/C++ for 7 or 8 years by then). I wasn't taught matrix math until pretty late in the curriculum, I want to say junior or senior year. Also I was lucky to have a semester of Scheme but they were transitioning to teaching Java around the time I graduated (I don't know if they ever switched back). A…
> Honestly I think it might be time to phase out teaching imperative and object-oriented programming. Most of the grief in my career has come from them. I don't care if they're where the jobs are. The mental cost of tracing through highly-imperative code, especially the new implicit style of languages and frameworks like Ruby and AngularJS (which have logic flows having no obvious connection to one another, or transition through async handlers connected by a convention which isn't immediately obvious to the developer) is so high that the underlying business logic is effectively obfuscated.
I don't think this is a fault of functional programming as much as it is a fault of implicit language constructs. There are common conventions where being able to chuck functions and closures around is actually useful (e.g. sorting). These language constructs/conventions are useful because they can be extremely expressive, but unfamiliar implicit behaviors cost me much more "working memory" to understand when I'm reading the code.
There's a version of object-oriented programming that mostly sticks to declarative behaviors and uses inheritance, unions, mix-ins, etc. to actually hide behavioral abstractions. The problem is that it often takes 5-10 years of experience before the programmer (myself included) begins to appreciate how important future readability of the code is, and to understand that the more exotic language features should be used sparingly.
Re: If You're Not Writing a Program, Don't Use a Programming Language [video]
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
A ton of problems in software engineering, I am convinced (and isn't wild generalization one of the marks of our field! I at least want to own my own hypocrisy here) are communication problems. Nearly all the interesting ones, anyway. And one of them is axioms no-one ever communicates . I've worked with programmers with at least three markedly different axiomatic bases, for want of some less pretentious – and less ex…
So where do Smalltalkers and Lispers go?
presumably in the "mathematical" group
Re: If You're Not Writing a Program, Don't Use a Programming Language [video]
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
It triggers me to no end when I watch an introductory course, for people with no previous exposure to any programming language, and the teacher starts with "public static void main()" In order to understand it, you need to have a good grasp of classes, static methods, access controls. This is usually followed up by a request to ignore the entire line, which is one of the worst habits you can have as a developer. Then…
Why would universities teach Java and C++ anyway? They are either 'boring' from a computer science perspective, or too convoluted for teaching concepts. Not a fan of Java by any means, but they should teach Java so graduating students can put that on their resume and get a job so they won't live with their parents until they are 35....
This is presumably why they do teach Java.
Re: If You're Not Writing a Program, Don't Use a Programming Language [video]
#199I wasn't exposed to spreadsheets until a few years into college back around 1996 or 1997 maybe (I had been programming in C/C++ for 7 or 8 years by then). I wasn't taught matrix math until pretty late in the curriculum, I want to say junior or senior year. Also I was lucky to have a semester of Scheme but they were transitioning to teaching Java around the time I graduated (I don't know if they ever switched back). A…
> show how spreadsheets and functional programming are equivalent
They are not in fact equivalent, unless the functional programming you're doing is trivial.
Re: If You're Not Writing a Program, Don't Use a Programming Language [video]
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you sure, such thing as "high-assurance AI/ML" doesn't exist? Are you an expert in AI, with many years of experience building products with AI technology?
I'm not an expert in AI, but as you can imagine I have to interact with a lot of people who are. What I do know is what it means to be able to do end-to-end verification and it seems fairly antithetical to the basis of machine learning which has an open-ended failure domain. If you could write an AI as a total program, it would cease to be probabilistic. It would become propositional, but would also seem to cease to…
"What foolishness! What nonsense! .... For as children tremble and fear everything in the blind darkness, so we in the light sometimes fear what is no more to be feared than the things children in the dark hold in terror and imagine will come true. This terror therefore and darkness of mind must be dispelled not by the rays of the sun and glittering shafts of day, but by the aspect and law of nature."
LUCRETIUS, De Rerum Natura
:)