Vigorous Public Debates in Academic Computer Science
blog.regehr.org
Vigorous Public Debates in Academic Computer Science
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Re: Vigorous Public Debates in Academic Computer Science
#2One debate that I thought would be mentioned is "Goto statement considered harmful", "'GOTO Considered Harmful' Considered Harmful.", and "GOTO Considered Harmful" Considered Harmful' Considered Harmful?" I think it's somewhat disappointing that a lot of CS education always mentions Dijkstra's original argument, but not the other side. The latter two can be found here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20090320002214/http://www.ecn.pur...
Re: Vigorous Public Debates in Academic Computer Science
#3I had heard vaguely of the 'microkernal debate' in the past, but never checked it out. Didn't realize the other main participant (aside from Linus Torvalds) was Andrew Tanenbaum. Very entertaining/interesting read. (The linked article refers us here: http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/appa.html)
Re: Vigorous Public Debates in Academic Computer Science
#4I had heard vaguely of the 'microkernal debate' in the past, but never checked it out. Didn't realize the other main participant (aside from Linus Torvalds) was Andrew Tanenbaum. Very entertaining/interesting read. (The linked article refers us here: http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/appa.html )
The Shapiro article in Tannenbaum's link is good too. He's a bright guy that did the EROS project for anyone that doesn't know. Here it is in archive.org:
https://web.archive.org/web/20050514121653/http://www.eros-o...
https://web.archive.org/web/20050211090602/http://www.eros-o...
Two other good articles are why the EAL4 evaluations that Windows et al were getting are worthless and what a secure, build system might look like.
https://web.archive.org/web/20040214043848/http://eros.cs.jh...
https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin...
Re: Vigorous Public Debates in Academic Computer Science
#5One debate that I thought would be mentioned is "Goto statement considered harmful", "'GOTO Considered Harmful' Considered Harmful.", and "GOTO Considered Harmful" Considered Harmful' Considered Harmful?" I think it's somewhat disappointing that a lot of CS education always mentions Dijkstra's original argument, but not the other side. The latter two can be found here: http://web.archive.org/web/20090320002214/http:/…
And who can forget when the debate went meta with "Considered Harmful" Essays Considered Harmful: http://meyerweb.com/eric/comment/chech.html
Re: Vigorous Public Debates in Academic Computer Science
#6One debate that I thought would be mentioned is "Goto statement considered harmful", "'GOTO Considered Harmful' Considered Harmful.", and "GOTO Considered Harmful" Considered Harmful' Considered Harmful?" I think it's somewhat disappointing that a lot of CS education always mentions Dijkstra's original argument, but not the other side. The latter two can be found here: http://web.archive.org/web/20090320002214/http:/…
The "GOTO considered harmful" papers seem to have been appended to Regehr's post.
Re: Vigorous Public Debates in Academic Computer Science
#7Some of those are classics. The Lipton-Perlis-DeMillo argument against program verification is a good one.[1] They demonstrated that manual programming verification via hand theorem proving is buggy. Automated theorem proving was new back then.
This was an issue back in the 80s for a philosophical reason in mathematics. Mathematics classically approves of short, clever, elegant proofs. The paper-and-pencil crowd was trying to do that for code. In practice, program verification is about mechanized grinding through massive numbers of dumb assertions to catch off-by-one errors.
This used to bother mathematicians. When the four-color theorem was originally proved, it was done partly by hand and partly with computer case analysis. The computer part bothered many mathematicians. The culture has changed. Recently, someone redid the proof with the old hand parts re-done by computer. Since that eliminated some possible human errors, that was a step forward in solidifying the proof.
We also know now how to check a theorem prover. Some theorem provers emit a proof trace, huge files of "Step 2437: apply rule 42 to change 2*X to X+X". Proof traces can be fed into a dumb proof checker which does the indicated rewrite and checks that the expected output is obtained.
So progress has resolved that issue.
Re: Vigorous Public Debates in Academic Computer Science
#8While not exactly a debate -- more of a fundamental difference in outlook -- these are interesting, completely opposite claims:
Bob Harper[1]:
> There is an alternative… without… reference to an underlying machine… [W]e adopt a linguistic model of computation, rather than a machine model, and life gets better! There is a wider range of options for expressing algorithms, and we simplify the story of how algorithms are to be analyzed.
Leslie Lamport[2]:
> Thinking is not the ability to manipulate language; it’s the ability to manipulate concepts. Computer science should be about concepts, not languages. … State machines… provide a uniform way to describe computation with simple mathematics. The obsession with language is a strong obstacle to any attempt at unifying different parts of computer science.
[1]: https://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/03/16/languages-a...
[2]: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/s...
Re: Vigorous Public Debates in Academic Computer Science
#9One debate that I thought would be mentioned is "Goto statement considered harmful", "'GOTO Considered Harmful' Considered Harmful.", and "GOTO Considered Harmful" Considered Harmful' Considered Harmful?" I think it's somewhat disappointing that a lot of CS education always mentions Dijkstra's original argument, but not the other side. The latter two can be found here: http://web.archive.org/web/20090320002214/http:/…
The best modern analysis of Dijkstra's original letter I've seen is is David Tribble's "Go To Statement Considered Harmful: A Retrospective" which dissects it line by line and explains it in the historical context in which Dijkstra wrote it.
Re: Vigorous Public Debates in Academic Computer Science
#10Some of those are classics. The Lipton-Perlis-DeMillo argument against program verification is a good one.[1] They demonstrated that manual programming verification via hand theorem proving is buggy. Automated theorem proving was new back then. This was an issue back in the 80s for a philosophical reason in mathematics. Mathematics classically approves of short, clever, elegant proofs. The paper-and-pencil crowd was…
This was the one I was going to bring up as well. USC-ISI had several students working in this space in the early 80's. The other one which comes to mind are the arguments about AI and whether or not it was a thing or an artifact of better algorithms.