The articles on his blog (http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/) give more in-depth explanations for those who dislike the slides.
"Algorithm" is not a four letter word
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Re: "Algorithm" is not a four letter word
#12Personally I really enjoyed the short slide by slide format a lot. Perhaps it's a short attention span brought on by years in front of a computer, but I struggle with massive walls of text occasionally. At the very least I found it to be a nice changed on top of being an interesting subject.
Ironically, I lost interest in this at some point because of the slide format. With a wall of text, I can figure out how long it is and whether I want to dedicate the time to read it. These cute arrow-key slides were giving me no feedback how many there are and whether it's going to take half an hour to go through them all, so I closed them. Heh.
There's #read/#total in the lower-right corner, fwiw. :)
Re: "Algorithm" is not a four letter word
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ironically, I lost interest in this at some point because of the slide format. With a wall of text, I can figure out how long it is and whether I want to dedicate the time to read it. These cute arrow-key slides were giving me no feedback how many there are and whether it's going to take half an hour to go through them all, so I closed them. Heh.
There's #read/#total in the lower-right corner, fwiw. :)
I didn't notice, but apparently I was right to abandon it!
Re: "Algorithm" is not a four letter word
#14For the curious, here's a link to Jamis' repository of Maze visualizations, implemented in CoffeeScript: https://github.com/jamis/csmazes
Re: "Algorithm" is not a four letter word
#15This is remarkable. The # of ways to solve the same problem is great (ironically, I knew mostly Prim's and Kruskal's algorithms because they are more common), the visualization is great too. I liked the slide format, a bit too long maybe.
Also, since it's a computer science post :) I would have added time complexity, just for sake of completeness.
A big plus to the whole concept of "code kata".
Great stuff.
Re: "Algorithm" is not a four letter word
#16Re: "Algorithm" is not a four letter word
#17Warning: severe pollution of "history" links in your browser ahead.
Worked fine for me on Chromuum.
http://ompldr.org/vYWw2MQ
Looks like this over here.
Re: "Algorithm" is not a four letter word
#18I'd like point out something that isn't mentioned in the slides at all. The ideas behind the algorithm are not just games, not just exercises, not just methods of self improvement. I'm reminded of Feynman's story of the wobbling plate. They have very deep implications for how we design programs and how we design programming languages.
The notion of search (logic programming, constraint solving) is a woefully under appreciated topic - I would argue because our programming languages make it very difficult to apply this kind of beautiful knowledge back onto the programming language itself.
What is a type system if not a kind of maze solver? What happens when you apply machine learning like heuristics to a pattern match compiler? What happens if we can apply algorithm rules at the level of the method signature?
Yes learn some algorithms, then question why our programming languages limit how much we can put these great ideas into practice.
Re: "Algorithm" is not a four letter word
#19Algorithms for brogrammers.
Re: "Algorithm" is not a four letter word
#20Warning: severe pollution of "history" links in your browser ahead.
Nice presentation, but Chrome 14 was using half a gig of RAM by the end. Seemed to use 4mb per slide.