Many different books, websites, articles, and personal correspondence. Lots of research. It's a ton of fun, and a lot of work.
From: nOSStr<-schmijos at 10/05 09:24
> Are you reading a particular book or some other source you'd like to share?
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Good morning Nostroids. My lovely wife and I are off to our nothern hideaway today. I'm neck deep into Dijkstra history, and it's really interesting. More later.
"The alternative, however, is to recognize that [new machines are] faster and that, hence, time does not matter so much any more [...] Hence, it becomse more realistic to invest some of the machine's speed in other things than sheer production, such as programming comfort, elegance, and reliability." Dijkstra, 1962
In the late '50s there was a big debate amongst the programmers of the day. Should recursion be a feature in our languages. The Algol 60 commitee debated this for some time; and the debate was not entirely civil.
Dijkstra was a big proponent of recursive functions. He thought all functions in Algol should allow recursion. He was nearly laughed out of one meeting for making that case. Others, who were far more concerned about efficiency of memory and time thought that recursion was too costly to allow. They accused Dijkstra of just wanting to "play". And who can blame them, the computers of the day were vacuum tube monstronsities with memories maintained in accoustic waves in big tubes of Mercury that had to be maintained at 45C. Cycle times were barely sub-millisecond. Stacks were not part of any computer hardware at the time.
Dijkstra took the long view. He thought that recursion added to the expressivity of a language; and that the biggest cost of an automated system was going to be _programmers_. This was not true at the time. Even very expensive programmers were cheap compared to computer time. If a programmer could save one hour per week of computer time, it would pay back his salary in relatively short order. In those days, efficiency at the bit and millisecond level was a top priority.
In the end, after much cajoling and nasty argumentation, Dijkstra won the day. Algol 60 was a recursive language. It's not clear to me, however, whether this helped, or hindered the acceptance of Algol 60. Most Americans of the day felt that the language was too academic (translation: slow and impractical) for commercial application.
Happy Wednesday Nostriches...
Today I'm teaching a class, getting my hair cut, getting a regular eye checkup, and then (if I can see after the dilation) reading more about Dijkstra and Turing.
This deep dive into software history is a lot of work, but it's really fun.
Been there. Done that. I spent a lot of time with mini-computers and micro-computers in the seventies and eighties. I wrote a _lot_ of assembler for the 8080 in an embedded real-time process control environment.
From: (Primordial) at 10/02 21:25
> Think about designing programs that operate in a physically constrained state-space
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I suppose I am pretty well known in certain circles; but that's just because I've been an opinionated loudmouth on the internet for the last 30 years or so.
Hi Pam,
Those are snowshoes on the wall. This was up at my cabin in the northwoods of Wisconsin.
Learning curve for writing? I love writing educational stuff. It's in my blood somehow. My first book was published in 1995. The title had nine words. I've since learned that two word titles sell better than 9 word titles. ;-) Advice? Read a lot. Write a lot.
Yes, I was there when the first scrum master course was scheduled. Ken Schwaber came to me and asked if he could borrow one of my classrooms. I ran a training company in those days and I had several classrooms. I didn't attend because I had somewhere else to be. I also thought it was a dumb idea. Who would ever want to be a "Certified Scrum Master"? That shows you how much I know. ;-)
Good morning all. Happy Monday. Today Iāll be writing more on my chapter about the history of C and Unix. What a fun tale!
Unix began as the scheduling algorithm for a finicky disk drive on a PDP-7. The author, Ken Thompson, wrote it after writing a nice space-travel game on that same PDP-7.
This was a hoot!
nostr:npub19mun7qwdyjf7qs3456u8kyxncjn5u2n7klpu4utgy68k4aenzj6synjnft has posted some flight content. Iām not sure his experience, seems to have at least a private pilotās license and his own plane. Iād love to know more about how he started flying.
Hello Mallory, I am an instrument rated private pilot with ~930 hours. I started flying ten years ago. My son had just started taking flying lessons, and I thought I'd join him. At age 60 I found this to be a significant challenge.
My PPL studies were hampered by two flight school closures and flying hiatuses of 3-6 months. That's not a good way to learn to fly and I wasted a number of years. In the end, however, I found a flight school with enough stability to do the job right. I got my PPL in 2017 and my instrument rating in 2018.
In those early years I flew a number of Warriors and and Archer. In the final flight school I was flying DA20s. I much prefer the latter. Lovely little machines based on glider technology. It took another year to get my instrument rating flying a DA40 with G1000 avionics. Nice.
With my instrument ticket in hand I looked for a good airplane to purchase. I found a very nice 2005 SR22 with 300 hours on the overhauled engine, and Avidyne avionics. N345TS -- The Countess. I picked her up from Greensboro in February of 2020. That date was very, very fortunate.
Covid clamped down in March, but I could still fly. My wife and I flew all over the country during those crazy days. We have children and grandchildren in four different states spread out from the central plains to the Gulf of Mexico, to the southwest desert. The airports were still open, the FBOs were still manned, and in that microcosm of general aviation life was still pretty normal. So we flew and flew and flew.
Nowadays I do a lot of dog rescue and Lifeline Pilot flights. I fly for business as well, and still travel to see my kids and grandkids from time to time. Overall it was a great decision to learn to fly. I recommend it. It is a kind of freedom that has to be experienced to understood.
From: -Mallory<-DerekRoss at 09/25 17:08
> nostr:npub19mun7qwdyjf7qs3456u8kyxncjn5u2n7klpu4utgy68k4aenzj6synjnft has posted some flight content. Iām not sure his experience, seems to have at least a private pilotās license and his own plane. Iād love to know more about how he started flying.
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Shameless plug: my recent book, Functional Design, is a deep dive into the union of the three paradigms.
Functional Design: Principles, Patterns, and Practices (Robert C. Martin Series)
Structured Programming is discipline imposed upon direct transfer of control.
Object Oriented Programming is discipline imposed upon indirect transfer of control.
Functional Programming is discipline imposed upon assignment.
Discipline is a good thing.
A very nice TDD tutorial.
Iām a big fan of Functional Programming; I think itās great.
Iām a big fan of Object Oriented Programming; I think itās great.
Iām a big fan of Procedural Programming; I think itās great.
Iām a really big fan of using all three together at the same time. I think that should be our standard.
If you pin your hopes and fears on AI you will be disappointed.
Every decade there are innovations that promise to spell the end of all programmers. First it was compilers. Then it was COBOL. Then it was OO. Then it was logic programming. Then it was fuzzy logic and backchaining AI, Then it was MDA. Now itās LLMās.
I just finished a draft of chapters on Grace Hopper and John Kemeny. Stone knives and bearskins doesn't begin to describe what those folks had to deal with.
I'm probably the wrong guy to ask, but I think there's a doctoral thesis in the economic and social impacts of the electronic struggle for freedom. This would include nostr, bitcoin, and the penumbra of other less viable crypto and fediverse technologies.
From: LifeLoveLiberty<-... at 09/17 08:23
> What do you suggest as the best topic to get Phd on management+nostr
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I'm not sure if the original is still around. #[4] may have it. The best I can point you to is the NIP repository. Check out NIP-01. https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/tree/master
From: LifeLoveLiberty<-... at 09/17 07:59
> Would you send me that paper's link for citation ?
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Nah, just the luck of good timing. 1952 was a great year to be born for someone in my field.
From: cameri at 09/17 07:54
> Most impressive!
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