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Re: What math textbooks are "CS-friendly": criteria?
Posted:
Feb 28, 2014 7:10 PM
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>
> The original question was "What drives computer language development,
> mathematics or programmers?"
>
>
That sounds like a false dichotomy, as if mathematician-programmer were not
a species e.g. Wolfram does not exist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_P9HqHVPeik (re Wolfram Language [tm])
Regarding the "structured programming" revolution, I showed up later, but a
CS guy, also very religious (in the C.S. Lewis sense, big around Princeton)
had me in tow for a bunch of ADA conventions. He wanted me to see what
paradigm shifts were like and frequently told the story of how he was in
the room when Edsger Dijkstra was lecturing, and coders would get enraged
and storm out, not wanting to be told how to do their own jobs after all
these years.
This was the Wild West time in programming, when "no GOTO talk" was new on
the block, and Spaghetti Code was the norm.
Structured Programming was an early attempt to get untangled, or less
tangled.
OO is sometimes cast as a follow-on wave with similar goals, though the
rhetoric was different, more about how natural it was to think in terms of
objects, since we do it anyway, with or without a computer. Arch Davis was
my friend's name. Interesting guy.
As I think I mentioned, Princeton when I got there had just boldly
scattered APL terminals rather randomly across campus such that I,
new-in-the-USA and practicing eating spam [tm] from WaWa (convenience store
adjacent the Dinky, the Princeton-to-mainline shuttle), could pick it up
(APL) as an expensive toy, and teach it to play Battleship.
I remember reading code, symbol-by-symbol, over the phone to Glenn Baker,
then at Brown, later an archivist for CDI.org (now merged with POGO.org
[1]) and, after that, a filmmaker, mostly of documentaries.
He'd been my bud in the Philippines and later joined the crew in Jersey
City, when I had my high school teaching gig.
My main interest was social media by then, but not called that yet, but
with a HQS at NJIT where Murray Turroff worked. I was an early adopter of
IGC.org technology. I was also interested in hypertext and hugged Ted
Nelson's 'Computer Lib / Dream Machines' close to my futuristic little
heart. This was like 1981 or whatever with HTTP just around the corner.[2]
Kirby
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20010302074626/http://www.cdi.org/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext_Transfer_Protocol
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