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| bio | website | mathscitech.org/articles |
|---|---|---|
| location | London, United Kingdom | |
| age | ||
| visits | member for | 10 months |
| seen | Apr 5 at 20:58 | |
| stats | profile views | 12 |
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Feb 25 |
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Introducing Programming To a Mathematician I have to disagree. Why would a young kid, interesting in maths, be attracted to Machine code? And why C? Assembly presumes far too much knowledge about processors. C likewise makes many requirements that are best left to someone wanting to learning serious programming: pointers, registers, scoping, types. For a first introduction to programming for such a person, something that focuses on algorithms or on applications of mathematical ideas (probability, randomness, simulations), is much better. Python, Lisp/Forth, Basic even. Bourne-shell?? Why?... |
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Jan 21 |
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Genetic Algorithm - solving a matrix with hard and soft constraints This would be better posted in Computational Science or Cross Validated (Statistics). |
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Nov 12 |
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Don Knuth and MMIXAL vs. Chuck Moore and Forth — Algorithms and Ideal Machines — was there cross-pollination / influence in their ideas / work? @DaveClarke: Under what tags would you see it appearing in CS? One of my reasons for TCS was the presence of similarly wide-scoped questions tagged as 'soft questions', 'big picture' and 'historical overview' -- all which had pretty reasonable followings. I don't see any such tags in CS. |
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Nov 12 |
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Don Knuth and MMIXAL vs. Chuck Moore and Forth — Algorithms and Ideal Machines — was there cross-pollination / influence in their ideas / work? Apologies! Let me know if there's something I can do to reverse it and have it go through as per process. |
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Nov 12 |
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Don Knuth and MMIXAL vs. Chuck Moore and Forth — Algorithms and Ideal Machines — was there cross-pollination / influence in their ideas / work? As a sort of tester, I've added the question on TCS here: cstheory.stackexchange.com/q/14308/12464 Be curious to see how it fares there vs. here. You might be right as to audience... |
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Nov 12 |
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Don Knuth and MMIXAL vs. Chuck Moore and Forth — Algorithms and Ideal Machines — was there cross-pollination / influence in their ideas / work? @ThomasOwens: Just visited Computer Science, Computational Science, and Theoretical Computer Science. If it does indeed get migrated, my view is that probably the best home for it would be the Theoretical CS folks. They've got tags for 'soft questions', 'historical overview', and 'big picture'. Neither of the other two seem to have tags for questions such as this. Additionally, LISP and Forth are probably more in the knowledge domain of the TCS guys. So I'll let you decide whether to migrate it, but if so, can we please go with TCS? (I've become a member, in advance.) |
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Nov 5 |
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Should comments say WHY the program is doing what it is doing? (opinion on a dictum by the inventor of Forth) But at what higher level? Seems that documents outside of the code often get disconnected over time so that a different maintainer coming back to the code 10 years on may not know that a document even exists which has relevant background material like algorithm selection. Somehow information that is not linked to code seems to be at high risk of being forgotten. Which then suggests comments in the code itself. |
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Nov 1 |
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Should comments say WHY the program is doing what it is doing? (opinion on a dictum by the inventor of Forth) Fair enough. Original quote is here: colorforth.com/POL.htm You'll find the paraphrase is almost entirely Moore's words. It's a large document. Search for 'Use comments sparingly!' (bottom of section 2.4) |
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Nov 1 |
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Why would company develop an atmosphere which discourage code comments? +1 -- Like this. This tells WHAT the program does, but not HOW. The HOW is obvious -- it's the lines that follow the comment. The WHAT succinctly describes the section's intent / objective. And that, I think, is quite valuable later when scanning a large quantity of code looking for the section that does a particular task. |
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Nov 1 |
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Should comments say WHY the program is doing what it is doing? (opinion on a dictum by the inventor of Forth) Thanks for the response. So in your opinion then, should comments include justifications for design choices, e.g. the reasons why a particular design was chosen over reasonable alternatives? |
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Sep 16 |
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Mercurial release management. Rejecting changes that fail testing To the OP: you're clearly on this site reasonably regularly. Is there any reason why you seem to ask questions but accept no answers? It's usually good practice on these sites to reward good answers with feedback in recognition for the time they've invested in your question. You've got a few very good answers below... (nudge nudge) |
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Sep 16 |
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Mercurial release management. Rejecting changes that fail testing (+1) very clear description -- and very helpful. Thanks for this! (It's a pity the OP hasn't returned to officially review the responses.) |
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Sep 10 |
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Learning OO for a C Programmer You may find this easier than you expect. Obj-C will reduce the language gap since it is quite similar to C -- the differences will naturally emphasise the key concepts you'll need to master. My suggestion is more around choosing some fruitful toy problems / exercises. I expect you'll already have a strong intuition for OO design because anyone coding solutions for as long as you will intrinsically appreciate the cleanliness and elegance of wrapping functions and data structures within their own package (class). [PS I went from C to OO first via Obj-C, then Ruby, now Python -- Good luck!] |
