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Cultures of Code

americanscientist.org

1–10 of 26 posts

Re: Cultures of Code

#3
[not related to content] I usually print interesting articles to XPS because the XPS reader on my tablet is so much faster than web browsers. As I've been doing this I've noticed that lots of sites out there just cannot be printed. For example, this article's content is put into some sort of a container, I presume, that has a fixed width or something that cuts off a part of the text. Even the "printer-friendly" version exhibits this problem. Sadly, but for me this means I'm not reading the article.

Re: Cultures of Code

#4

[not related to content] I usually print interesting articles to XPS because the XPS reader on my tablet is so much faster than web browsers. As I've been doing this I've noticed that lots of sites out there just cannot be printed. For example, this article's content is put into some sort of a container, I presume, that has a fixed width or something that cuts off a part of the text. Even the "printer-friendly" versi…

I'm not sure if I understand your workflow - but the page also has a link to PDF, may be that works for you.

Re: Cultures of Code

#5
> I would not contend that mastery of the more theoretical topics is a prerequisite to becoming a good programmer. There’s abundant evidence to the contrary. But it is a necessary step in absorbing the culture of computer science.

I personally don't care about my feelings about the culture of computer science. I care about computer science, and I think you have to participate in all of the worlds, to achieve a mature understanding of the computer and it's role in society. When I can separate my mathematical and logical mind from my emotional mind, I can focus enough to do work. When my emotional mind ramps up because I'm (rather unscientifically) comparing myself to a very selectively observational evaluation of the value of the achievements of others, I am not sure what gets done aside from the passage of time.

Re: Cultures of Code

#6

[not related to content] I usually print interesting articles to XPS because the XPS reader on my tablet is so much faster than web browsers. As I've been doing this I've noticed that lots of sites out there just cannot be printed. For example, this article's content is put into some sort of a container, I presume, that has a fixed width or something that cuts off a part of the text. Even the "printer-friendly" versi…

As I coincidentally just mentioned minutes ago in a different article's thread:

Firefox Alt-V Y N for no styles, renders in black and white, text flows within the browser's border.

Re: Cultures of Code

#7

[not related to content] I usually print interesting articles to XPS because the XPS reader on my tablet is so much faster than web browsers. As I've been doing this I've noticed that lots of sites out there just cannot be printed. For example, this article's content is put into some sort of a container, I presume, that has a fixed width or something that cuts off a part of the text. Even the "printer-friendly" versi…

I'm not sure if I understand your workflow - but the page also has a link to PDF, may be that works for you.

Thank you very much, this is so much better.

Re: Cultures of Code

#8

[not related to content] I usually print interesting articles to XPS because the XPS reader on my tablet is so much faster than web browsers. As I've been doing this I've noticed that lots of sites out there just cannot be printed. For example, this article's content is put into some sort of a container, I presume, that has a fixed width or something that cuts off a part of the text. Even the "printer-friendly" versi…

You have solved your problem here, but also take a look at:

https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/zap.html#zap_style_s...

Re: Cultures of Code

#9
> A prominent example is “What can be computed efficiently?” Theoretical computer science seizes on this question as one of its most central, existential concerns, but the answer also matters to those who write and run programs for practical purposes.

The problem is not that a theoretician has a different answer to the question than a software engineer, but that they are asking different questions with the same words. I think this is a good reason for the fields to be considered different.

Re: Cultures of Code

#10
I'm not as worried about the author's conclusions as he seems to be. I think there will always be more engineers than physicists, more financial experts than economists, and more security professionals than cryptographers. There will always be more people who want to take advantage of the fruits of basic research than there are people who want to do that basic research. And moreover, the basic researchers are generally not as publicly celebrated than their entrepreneurial counterparts (cf Steve Jobs vs Don Knuth or Dennis Ritchie). Without data showing the decline of the number of people who want to do basic science, I'm not convinced that things like the theory of parsing will be lost to history.

That being said, I think there is a lot of extremely exciting stuff going on in theoretical computer science (this is my field), and I think we could do a lot better publicizing our work to encourage more people to think about our problems. It's a shame that there are no career benefits to doing so.

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