posted February 15, 2007 04:11 AM            

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Warped by the rain, Driven by the snow...

posted February 15, 2007 05:26 AM            

Charles Simonyi and 'Intentional Programming'
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/18047/page1/

And this one is about new computer languages:
(BASIC mentioned nowhere unfortunately)

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/02/next-big-language.html

posted February 15, 2007 08:54 AM            

Seems to me that's been the real 'choke point' for a very long time.......

We don't need better computers or better computer languages. We need better programmers.

Maybe if we could graduate more than 50% of our kids from high school actually performing at grade level we'd have a small start on this.

(50% = Milwaukee Public Schools)

MCM

posted February 15, 2007 08:56 AM            

NO, it should not be easier to write quality computer programs.

Programming is a tough, demanding professional vocation, which pays well for a simple reason: Not everybody can do it.

posted February 15, 2007 09:06 AM            

It is interesting to note that in Milwaukee only 50% of schoolkids leave school
with any kind of grade.

In Britain things are worse, now everybody is leaving school with qualifications
in all sorts of subjects, and most kids will leave school and go to university.

Sounds great doesn't it? but what has happened over here is that the standards have
been lowered so much to make the governments education policy look good. Wow! how
many kids get through to university!!

We have got university graduates who are not able to read and write. At least you
know where you stand.

posted February 15, 2007 09:45 AM            

And the self-described 'educationally enlightened' wonder why enrollment at MPS goes down while enrollment in 'choice' (taxpayer supported, parentally chosen, privately owned) schools goes up?

posted February 15, 2007 10:01 AM            

If you want to make "Hi-Speed programms" (thats something tuned like a tuned sports car)
then you need to do the same like a car tuner does with the car parts:
-> take each peace and make it as performant as possible.

If you are satisfied with anything thats just running, it may be a lot easier and you may not necessarily
need to look at any detail. You may even built up the thing "out of templates".

Everything is possible if your target is clear.

Whats equal among whther you built a machine or a program,
high quality and hi-performance need more effort to look at these details
like the "loops and branches".

posted February 15, 2007 10:55 AM            

This eleven part article is comprehensive in its scope. It makes
me wonder whether future operating systems should be built around
a kernel of games technology.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,594,00.asp

posted February 15, 2007 06:01 PM            

I'm thinking about a programmers revision control system that works something
like this in simple analogy...

Say I have a printed sheet of code... change 10 % of it and if I lay
one sheet on top of the other for various sections I should be able to shift
one page over the other in such a way that 80% of the code would match leaving
only a small percentage that has changed...

While this is easy to see as doing it physically it taxes my little mind as to
how to do this in code.... what the human mind sees as simple becomes a major
undertaking when you want to code it....

Ergo a code rev system that is completely automatic, would store only actual code
changes and the ability to go to any revision or compile number.

It just seems that since computers are so old ( in computer years ) that these
kinds of things should be easier.

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Warped by the rain, Driven by the snow...

posted February 15, 2007 07:29 PM            

Aye, there's the rub.

When kids can't ring up a sale and make change except by pushing the picture of the burger and the picture of the five-dollar bill, don't hold your breath waiting for them to tell a computer what they want it to do...

posted February 16, 2007 06:11 AM            

If someone designs a plane with 200 seats nobody tries to seat 201
passengers, similarly virtually any engineering/building project.

I recently wrote a program to produce 500 single column pages. The
customer sent me an e-mail a few days later that he had used
the same progam to produce 1000 pages of two column text but he had
one or two errors.

Nobody would do that to a plane designer

Bob

posted February 16, 2007 06:22 AM            

Then the Computer lets the program grow in diffrent directions.
And tests it on the way till it reaches its taget.

I think they use it in construction of car-parts and airplanes,
but not yet in programm-parts.

While its thinkable, especially in optimizing programms "like in a wind-channel".

posted February 16, 2007 01:52 PM            

Babe Ruth set a number of baseball records, which have since been
surpassed ... yet the game and equipment all evolved during the
interval, so there is always the nagging question of whether any
later player could have exceeded his results if forced to play
under the same handicaps.

Before the invention of photography, efforts were made to render
portraits as realistic as possible, sometimes to an astonishing
degree. When photographs reached that ultimate goal of faithful
duplication with no interpretive skill, art merely changed
direction and moved towards impressionism and other schools of
art which de-emphasized the literal intepretation, and the art
of photography took off as well, in which composition, subject.
the use of light and shadow, marked the difference between an
exceptional photograph and a simple snapshot.

A lot of people have access to digital and audio recorders,
software for composing photo albums, video streams, music,
animation, and a whole lot more. Let few seem to have the drive
or vision necessary to create anything really innovative or
original. Much effort is made to merely duplicate the groundwork
done by others.

I think it should be clear by these examples that we cannot
measure or define creativitg in terms of megabytes of memory or
megahertz of speed. Computers are merely a tool, and the more
complex a tool, the more likely that becoming a master of its
use is going to consume years of your life. I found out years
ago that programming a HP-25C calculator was in some ways more
fun and challenging, and more fruitful, simply because it was
easier to recognize what might be possible with it. With today's
computers, it is much harder to determine the boundaries, and you
are always faced with the realization that you may not know enough
or have enough time or energy to be able to achieve your goals
unless you set your own boundaries and hold to them.

If Michaelangelo had access to a camera, would he have done more
with it as a tool? Or would it have become a distraction, and
worse, an instrument capable of mocking his best efforts as a
painter and sculpture? The budding artist in many people may be
wiped out by exposing them to the computer at a time in their
life when they are ill prepared to understand its down side.