101–110 of 110 posts
I lived the day to see YC giving credit to PG for an article written by Knuth. What's next? Symphony No. 9 by Paul Graham? Theory of Relativity by Paul Graham? The Bible? :-)
Title now changed from "Paul Graham: Programming as Art" to Knuth:
Computer Programming as an Art
By Donald E. Knuth
It's that simple.
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OK, but why does PG host this? It's freely available: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=361612
That one is a scanned PDF; its contents don't appear to be indexed by, e.g., Google; its availability is dependent on the continued goodwill of the ACM. Paul Graham's copy is plain HTML, sitting on the open web where anyone can see it and index it, and while for the rest of us its availability is dependent on PG's continued goodwill presumably he likes being able to rely on it staying there as long as he wants unless…
Searching for "Computer Programming as an Art" the PDF comes up as the second link (below PG's rip off). Not that it's even relevant because it's given as a direct link.
A scanned PDF is a closer reproduction to the original presentation, and easier to save for later to read.
I trust the ACM's "goodwill" to continue hosting it more than I trust it to remain on PG's website.
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I agree, craft is much more appropriate. I think this is a confusing essay, because in everyday speech "art" is employed to mean something very different from "an art" and we get lost in semantics. The continued references to obsolete definitions confuse things further. In practice, the phrase "an art" is usually used in the same way as "an artform", as it is not meant to be taken literally; a commentator may say "th…
I agree, but I'll go further than you - I don't think this essay is confusing at all. It's simply nonsense - the kind of thing someone clever writes when they're discussing a subject completely outside their area of competence. CS can be a craft. It's not one of the arts, not even if it's beautifully put together, because the arts are not primarily about technique - they're about capturing and distilling human experi…
I'm not sure what you're implying here, but Knuth does know what art is, as he almost majored in Music. See this for some recent work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_1a6bHGQGo
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The way I tend to picture roles in software is in analogy to my old job in aerospace. We have scientists/researchers who focus on the theoretical aspects. We have engineers who have a reasonable understanding of the theoretical aspects and tend to work in the design space. And we have craftsmen/technicians who have a reasonable understanding of design and tend to spend most of their time coding. A sort of pastime of…
The reason I find Haskell interesting is precisely that it's the only place I know where the theoretically-minded and the practically-minded get together and interpollinate. Everywhere else the one group pretty much just sneers at the other. If it doesn't always go 100% smoothly in Haskell-land, well, it's not as if we collectively have a lot of practice in getting along across that boundary. Consequently, Haskell is…
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> Yeah you "explore stuff" in any field. And you do experiments in many fields! "An experiment is a procedure carried out to verify, refute, or establish the validity of a hypothesis. Experiments provide insight into cause-and-effect by demonstrating what outcome occurs when a particular factor is manipulated. Experiments vary greatly in goal and scale, but always rely on repeatable procedure and logical analysis of…
> And you do experiments in many fields! See you are proving my own point. Just because you do exploratory stuff and run "experiments" that doesn't make what you science. What isn't science then? > I have done a lot of performance work in my career, and there you run experiments almost continuously Yes me too. But I am not a scientist like Einstein. There is a stretch in going from I am debugging some program and try…
Look, I tend to say that "Computer Science" is a bit pretentious, "playing with computers" is overall more appropriate for the level our field is at. Not sure where you got Einstein from. And, in the words of Wolfgang Pauli: "Ach, that isn't even wrong".
Bringing Einstein, who was a theorist, into a discussion about experiments is downright silly, and makes me question whether you have any idea as to what you're talking about.
Second, assuming for the sake of argument that Einstein was an experimenter, it would be just about the biggest straw-man imaginable. If experiments are only experiments if performed by one of the greatest scientists who ever lived, then science effectively doesn't exist and there are no scientists, to several significant figures.
However, the question was not who is an awesome scientist, but whether there are experiments in CS, whether empiricism is relevant especially vs. the entire field being a trivial application of mathematical theory.
And that is, for me, easy to answer: it is a highly empirical field. If you think it is a trivial application of mathematical theory, you don't know what you're talking about, neither in theory nor in practice.
And yes: there is a lot of science being done that isn't at the level of Einstein or the people at CERN or Fermilab.
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That one is a scanned PDF; its contents don't appear to be indexed by, e.g., Google; its availability is dependent on the continued goodwill of the ACM. Paul Graham's copy is plain HTML, sitting on the open web where anyone can see it and index it, and while for the rest of us its availability is dependent on PG's continued goodwill presumably he likes being able to rely on it staying there as long as he wants unless…
What a bunch of lame BS excuses. Searching for "Computer Programming as an Art" the PDF comes up as the second link (below PG's rip off). Not that it's even relevant because it's given as a direct link. A scanned PDF is a closer reproduction to the original presentation, and easier to save for later to read. I trust the ACM's "goodwill" to continue hosting it more than I trust it to remain on PG's website.
Sure, if you search for its title. But if you search for text within it, you'll find it doesn't come up at all.
> I trust the ACM's "goodwill" [...]
Sure. My suggestion is that Paul Graham trusts his own goodwill more than the ACM's and that that's one reason why he's put a copy on his website.
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> You have to find the artists' artist and mix her color 5000 times, like roll-on-your-head Shaolin Temple skull-hardening. Return to the 36th Chamber and draw with charcoal attached to the end of a long stick of bamboo, then ring the bell, for another style has died. Or, you know, go to art school.
Why the downvote aggro for a tounge-in-cheek quip?
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I agree, but I'll go further than you - I don't think this essay is confusing at all. It's simply nonsense - the kind of thing someone clever writes when they're discussing a subject completely outside their area of competence. CS can be a craft. It's not one of the arts, not even if it's beautifully put together, because the arts are not primarily about technique - they're about capturing and distilling human experi…
> I agree, but I'll go further than you - I don't think this essay is confusing at all. It's simply nonsense - the kind of thing someone clever writes when they're discussing a subject completely outside their area of competence. I'm not sure what you're implying here, but Knuth does know what art is, as he almost majored in Music. See this for some recent work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_1a6bHGQGo
What are you implying? That studying some Music makes you an artist?