UX design on resource constrained systems
First make a modern UI for sufficiently complex application.
Then make students to improve it to be usable on low memory, low cpu, high network latency and slow network speed system...
Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)
261–270 of 308 posts
Re: Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes please. Even senior engineers apply with their debugging abilities limited to sprinkling print-exit over the code. Do you have a moment to talk about our saviour, Lord interactive debugging?
Sometimes logs are the only way. It's old but reliable.
I’m not negating that. But in most cases, using a debugger is the vastly superior way to debug issues, yet many developers have never bothered to pick up on that knowledge. Like a carpenter that hasn’t ever learned to work with power tools and insists to use manual screwdrivers for everything.
Re: Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe it should be "really learn about object-oriented programming (at a low level)". Methods are functions, with an implicit argument usually called "self". Unless they are static, in which case, they are just regular functions. Classes are data structures, abstract methods are function pointers, inheritance adding data at the end of an existing data structure. In fact, inheritance is like a special case of composit…
From https://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/... (the koan below is a bit worn out but the email thread is also enlightening) The venerable master Qc Na was walking with his student, Anton. Hoping to prompt the master into a discussion, Anton said "Master, I have heard that objects are a very good thing - is this true?" Qc Na looked pityingly at his student and replied, "Foolish pupil - objects ar…
People get passionate about how to move around a bunch of 1s and 0s.
Re: Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)
#264> CSCI 2100: Unlearning Object-Oriented Programming?? People in tech industry, seem to have no idea how the systems in the wild work. Enterprise Java runs the backbone of operations for all of large business organisations such as banks. It is just as grounded as MS Office is. It is object-oriented software that is running the bulk of production environments of the world. Who is going to maintain these systems for the…
"CSCI 2100: Unlearning Object-Oriented Programming" immediately caused me to disagree this one. When I code in C, in the end, I usually miss the syntax for defining "objects/classes" (structs with functions and access controls), the syntax/notation that encapsulates/binds/groups the related state and its functions/API to define some specific concept/model == custom data type. Of course OOP can be taken to extreme com…
> Of course OOP can be taken to extreme complexity and then lose its usefulness.
The type bike shedding that seems to inevitably occur in typescript discussions has completely turned me off of it.
Now that I'm self-employed, I just use JSDoc comments and an IDE that warns me when I break the definitions.
Much faster iteration, much easier to debug, and no wasted meetings moralizing over the use of `any`.
Re: Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)
#265something on the lines of "software paleontology" where you learn how to deal with REALLY legacy software think about decompile java apps that don't even have the original version control anymore, change it, and deploy it again
...deploy it again straight to prod because there aren't any other environments. Prepare to swap back quickly if something goes wrong.
Yep, I've been there.
Re: Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
From https://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/... (the koan below is a bit worn out but the email thread is also enlightening) The venerable master Qc Na was walking with his student, Anton. Hoping to prompt the master into a discussion, Anton said "Master, I have heard that objects are a very good thing - is this true?" Qc Na looked pityingly at his student and replied, "Foolish pupil - objects ar…
People get passionate about how to move around a bunch of 1s and 0s.
Sometimes lives depend on it. Usually they don't.
Re: Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)
#267> PSYC 4410: Obsessions of the Programmer Mind Identify and understand tangential topics that software developers frequently fixate on: code formatting, taxonomy, type systems, splitting projects into too many files. Includes detailed study of knee-jerk criticism when exposed to unfamiliar systems. Each class would "just" study a hackernews thread in depth.
Going by HN preferences, I'd also add "in-depth typography" and "medieval books" for some reason.
Re: Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ll take the fight on Algorithmic complexity any day. There are many cases where O(n^2) will beat O(n). Utilising the hardware can make a bigger difference than algorithmic complexity in many cases. Vectorised code on linear memory vs unvectorised code on data scattered around the heap.
I sincerely hope you are joking...
Big O notation drops the coefficient, sometimes that coefficient is massive enough that O(N) only beats out O(N^2) at billions of iterations.
Premature optimisation is a massive issue, spending days working on finding a better algorithm is many times not with the time spent since the worse algorithm was plenty good enough.
Real world beats algorithmic complexity many many times because you spent ages building a complex data structure with a bunch of heap allocations all over the heap to get O(N) while it's significantly faster to just do the stupid thing that is in linear memory.
Re: Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe it should be "really learn about object-oriented programming (at a low level)". Methods are functions, with an implicit argument usually called "self". Unless they are static, in which case, they are just regular functions. Classes are data structures, abstract methods are function pointers, inheritance adding data at the end of an existing data structure. In fact, inheritance is like a special case of composit…
From https://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/... (the koan below is a bit worn out but the email thread is also enlightening) The venerable master Qc Na was walking with his student, Anton. Hoping to prompt the master into a discussion, Anton said "Master, I have heard that objects are a very good thing - is this true?" Qc Na looked pityingly at his student and replied, "Foolish pupil - objects ar…
Thanks for the reminder of this thread!
For those who don't know, Guy L. Steele (Anton's interlocutor here) is the original designer of the Scheme programming language, the author of the "Lambda: The Ultimate Zozo" series of papers, and the second biggest contributor to the design of Java.
Re: Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
Philosophy is definitely a social or formal science (depending on who you ask).
I'm well read on the topic and I've never heard it referred to as "a social or formal science." Where is this coming from?
I have thought that's the common definition and doesn't need much thought...
My dictionary absolutely implies that, it even claims that all the sciences were split of from Philosophy and that a common modern topic of Philosophy is the theory of science. The point of Philosophy is to define truth in all aspects, how is that not science? It's even in the name: "friend of truth". Philosophy is even more fundamental and formal than mathematics. Mathematics asks what sound systems are, what properties they have and how they can be generalized. Philosophy asks, what something truly is, what it means to know, what it means to have a system and whether it's real. The common trope of going even more fundamental/abstract goes: "biology -> chemistry -> physics -> mathematics -> philosophy"