Jim and Bob's Excellent Adventure (Score:1)by chip_s_ahoy on Wednesday October 23, @02:05AM (#4510668)

Or..."We've just GOT to get to Seattle for free!"Jim, I really want to go to that conference in Seattle, but I just can't afford it."Gosh, Bob, why don't we throw something together, cite all the books on that shelf over there, and submit it as a paper?""Excellent!"

Not accepted for OOPSLA per se (Score:2)by Ristretto(…) on Thursday October 24, @09:42AM (#4521514)

You have to be careful when you say that something is "accepted at OOPSLA." I happen to have a paper that's in the technical track of OOPSLA this year (…). That's where the real computer science is happening. Then there are the other sessions that are, shall we say, not held to the same standards...

Re:What's the point? (Score:1) by Find love Online on Tuesday October

Perhaps it's great but more than likely it's another one of those pointless academic super high level treaties on software construction that really don't help anyone write better software.

Actualy, I think it's supposed to be a joke.

Lonely?

Find love on the internet [friendfinder.com]

Nothing new here... (Score:4, Insightful) by Jagasian on Wednesday

October 23, @10:51AM ...

I especially liked the part where they say that elements of a program are not abstractions but symbols. Maybe someone should tell the writer that Computer Science started as an off-shoot of a branch of Constructive Formal Mathematics known as "Metamathematics". Metamathematics concerned itself with symbolic representations of abstractions. Mathematicians 100 years ago spent a lot of effort studying various aspects of Metamathematics. Read the original works of Brouwer, Hilbert, Kleene, Church, Turing, and Godel to name a few. Kleene has a good classic textbook on Metamathematics that the writer of this paper should read.

This paper is not scientific. It is not mathematical.

This paper expounds nothing new, original, or worthwhile. ...

Good heavens - I'm PostModern (Score:3, Insightful) by AlecC (alec@aleccawley.com) on Wednesday October 23, @07:15AM

So now I have got a name for the way I have been programming all my life - use the best tool that comes to hand without argueing whether it is theoretically perfect. Use mixed tools if that is what the problem at hand demands. Don't reinvent if you can possibly beg/borrow/steal.

The paper strikes me as completey tautologous anywhere outside a Computer Science department (and probably to the more practical half of those inside). If you're involved in shipping code, either for money or for the good of the community, you are interested in what works, not what is theoretically best. Of course, if a nice theoretically clean tool does the job - use it. But if a steaming heap of old code does the job (where reliability and efficiency may for part of the spec), use that.

Welcome to the real world, guys.

Notes onPostmodern Programming

The ultimate goal of all computer science is the program.

The performance of programs was once the noblest function of computer science, and computer science was indispensable to

great programs. Today, programming and computer science exist in complacent isolation, and can only be rescued by the conscious

co-operation and collaboration of all programmers.

Designers, programmers, engineers, we must all return to programming! There is no essential difference between the

computer scientist and the programmer. The computer scientist is an exalted programmer. By the grace of Heaven and in rare

moments of inspiration which transcend the will, computer science may unconsciously blossom from the labour of the hand, but a

base in programming is essential to every computer scientist. It is there that the original source of creativity lies.

0. Manifesto

I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself, “Dijkstra would not have liked this,” well that would be enough immortality for me.

Edsger Wybe Dijkstra

1. To Our Reader

2. On Our Ability to Do Much

3. On the Notion of Program

4. On Pervasive Heterogeneity

5. On Abstraction

6. On Requirements

7. No Big Picture

8. On Modular Components

9. No Metaphor

9. No Metaphor

10. No Future?

11. Perl

When I started writing Perl, I'd actually been steeped in enough postmodernism to know that that's what I wanted to do. …

When I started designing Perl, I explicitly set out to deconstruct all the computer languages I knew and recombine or reconstruct them in a different way, because there were many things I liked about other languages, and many things I disliked. I lovingly reused features from many languages. (I suppose a Modernist would say I stole the features, since Modernists are hung up about originality.) Whatever the verb you choose, I've done it over the course of the years from C, sh, csh, grep, sed, awk, Fortran, COBOL, PL/I, BASIC-PLUS, SNOBOL, Lisp, Ada, C++, and Python. To name a few. To the extent that Perl rules rather than sucks, it's because the various features of these languages ruled rather than sucked.

Larry Wall

12. Messy is Good

13. Scrapheap System Construction

14. We’re All Devo

15. Small Stories of Devotion

…We have the whole world in our hands, smiles one. What the hell are we going to do with it, laughs the other.

Dinah Hawken

I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her, ‘I love you madly’, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, ‘As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.’ At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless have said what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her, but he loves her in an age of lost innocence. If the woman goes along with this, she will have received a declaration of love all the same.

Umberto Eco

Reflections on the Name of the Rose

I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her, ‘I love you madly’, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, ‘As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.’ At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless have said what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her, but he loves her in an age of lost innocence. If the woman goes along with this, she will have received a declaration of love all the same.

Umberto Eco

Reflections on the Name of the Rose

Notes onPostmodern Programming

Image Credits

• Bauhus Manifesto Frontispiece – Lyonel Feininger, Cathedral

– www.bauhaus.de

• Edsger Wybe Dijkstra:– Historia de la Computación

www-etsi2.ugr.es/alumnos/ mlii/Dijkstra.htm

• Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard– The Norwegian Computing Center 1960-84

– www.ifi.uio.no/~kristen/FORSKNINGSDOK_MAPPE/

Image Credits

• Alan Turing – Turing's Treatise on Enigma

– mad.home.cern.ch/frode/crypto/

– Sir John Dermot Turing

• Bombe– Virtual Bletchley Park Now by Tony Sale

– www.codesandciphers.org.uk

• Hieronymus Bosch: The Garden of Earthly Delights

– athena.english.vt.edu/~baugh/bosch/

Image Credits

• Longlands Farm

– www.longlands.co.nz

• Edvard Munch: The Scream– The Ohio State University Anxiety and Stress Disorders Clinic

– anxiety.psy.ohio-state.edu

• ANNA HELD AUDETTE: Scrap Metal XIII

– www.annaheldaudette.com

• Ettore Sottsass: Bookshelf

– www.italianfurnishings.com

Image Credits

• Daimler Motor Carriage– www.truckworld.com

• Volkswagen Beetle– Volkswagen of America, Inc– www.vw.com

• Book Covers– www.amazon.com

• CRC Card :– Ward Cunningham– www.c2.com

• Illustration from Big Ball of Mud– Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder– www.laputan.org/mud/

Image Credits

• Sydney Opera House Roof– Biddle

• Spreadsheet Real Estate Usage– Daniel Ballinger

• Swimmer– Biddle

Image Credits

• Galaxies and Nebulae

– Hubble Space Telescope

– Space Telescope Science Institute

– oposite.stsci.edu

Image Credits

• Hello Kitty: – Sanrio http://www.sanrio.com/

– Hello Kitty Has No Mouth http://queeg.com/hellokitty/

Hello Kitty has no mouth, but she must scream.

That is why her head is so big.

Hello Kitty has no mouth, yet she speaks the truth.

…