Pugofer → Pug → ?

It was a rainy July day of 1993. My just-graduated student, Anuradha strode into the — at that time — ramshackle PU building with a mischievous twinkle in her eyes.

A: Sir!!!
Me: Yeah??
A: I've got a functional language for you!!!And she waved one (or was it 2?) 360 K floppies in front of my face
Me: Awww... We're a poor department we don't have fancy machines like Sun workstations to run these. In short FPLs are beautiful but only for the rich
A: It runs on PCs – Come see!!

A Fairy Tale And a Bridge

Momma: Dr. Einstein, What should my lil boy read so that he becomes like you?

Einstein: Read him fairy tales

Momma : ! 😯!!😯!!!

In this post I shall channel 'the late Dr. Einstein' to make a case for Pugofer as a fairy tale.

The ‘User’ and Technology

1 Introduction

[This post is mostly for my students]

I had mentioned in the class that you are graded along three dimensions

By the nature of things for the most part, concepts are evaluated. And a bit of perspective.
If you have done some coding your technology is satisfactory: ie you know how to turn on your machine, log in and enter code. If thats ok with you dont bother with this post
If you want to go beyond that grade you need to read this and implement some of the suggestions

2 The Neologism called ‘User’

Thinking is our most intimate activity, and a lot of it is revealed by the way in which we use (and misuse) our language…

Mechanism Romanticism and the Origins of the Computer

Guest Article: Reposted with thanks

---

The story of

The origins of the electronic computer…

as it is most frequently told, is an engaging tale of intellectual turbulence in the early decades of the twentieth century. The computer grew out of dramatic upheaval in the fields of mathematics and logic, not unlike what was happening at the same time in physics, politics, and the arts.  In this paper, we shall examine the origins of the computer from the perspectives of two competing world views, which we will call “Mechanism” and “Romanticism”, after Dahlbom and Mathiassen (1993). Although the computer is considered the crowning achievement of the former of these, we shall see that, ironically, it was inspired by a discovery that represented, in a sense, a major setback for the Mechanistic mode of thinking.

Tips for Emacs Beginners

Emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish. — Neal Stephenson

Q: Why should I learn emacs? Ive heard 'real programmers' use emacs…
A: Real programmers use their brain
Real programmers program their brain
Often, real programmers' brain-programming program is emacs. — Thien-Thi Nguyen

Well that's the advertisement…
Lets get down to some details – how to start using emacs

Baby Steps 0

You can start the tutorial with C-h t
Which unforunately wastes about 200 lines saying that C-f C-b C-p C-n will do the work of ↑ ↓ ← →
I suggest you ignore this archaism

A Little 25 year old Functional Parser Gem

1 Intro

When I was playing around inside Mark Jones' gofer sources in the early 90s I saw this piece of commented C code. The code was impenetrable… at first. But the comment was elegant and beautiful and cleared up the code nicely.. on careful reading.

Why is it needed?

Break is goto in disguise

On the python list there was a discussion about break.  I made the comment that break is just a euphemism for goto.  I thought that this would be a commonplace. However google does not give many useful hits for this.

So thought I'd cook up an example.
Here is Apple's famous SSL-bug in shortform

The Law of Primacy

I consider the absolute worst programming construct to be subroutine or the function.          Cleo Saulnier 

Hello?!?! Why pay attention to some random crank on the Internet?
Because I think he is onto something important...

Celebration of Obsolescence

Today is 13 Jan 2016, 150 years from the birth of G I Gurdjieff

Here's something I had written for a 13th Jan some years ago as my understanding of the message of Gurdjieff's magnum opus: Beelzebub's tales [Mr. B!]

We celebrate patriotism yet from the plane we see no lines

We celebrate humanity but humans are killing all life — including themselves

We celebrate art — For the neurotics by the psychotics

We celebrate religion — as an institutionalized way of hating 'others'

We celebrate technology to cure each of our problems — but technology

is our biggest problem

We celebrate science — Oh the vast aggrandisement of ignorance

We celebrate spirituality — The hysteria of the hypnotized

On this 13th of Jan, we celebrate our OBSOLETE WORLD!

Help us Mr B…

To laugh without cynicism

To weep without sentimentality

To live love

And to die free

How Long?

It takes 100 years for an idea to go from inception to general acceptance.
Dijkstra[1]

When I first read this I thought it alarming.

Then I started collecting some historical tit-bits[2]…

Faith and Rats, Gödel and Computer Science

Computer scientists dismiss Gödel as mathematics
Mathematicians classify Gödel as logic
Logicians slot Gödel into meta-mathematics
Meta-mathematicians know the truth of the matter…
…and have been dead for a century

I would like to suggest that this misunderstanding (or rather non-understanding) does not make it non-true.¹ Many educated people do know that Gödel’s theorem(s) is important even portentous. But somehow – like war – Yeah its bad but not my problem.

Let’s use the services of

A fever is raging in the town.
People are dying.

And I happen to find…
In the closet…
A dead rat

“What do rats have to do with…”

The Plague?

Do we need to start having a fever and swelling in the armpits to change our minds?
To my mind the mathematicians and CSists who think of Gödel as irrelevant are like people with a dead rat in their closet who are now beginning to run a fever and who still keep insisting:
“Whats a dead rat to do with the plague? Why should I bother?”
Gödel’s theorem is a dead rat in plague infested town. In the 1930s, people understood this. Somehow now everyone has forgotten. This post is to remind of these well-known and more well-forgotten facts.

The Terrible Theorem

Starting with the cute paradoxical statement

This statement is false

which is true if its false and false if true,  Gödels theorem maps out the large gulf between what is provable and what is true.
Now on the face of it this seems like a ridiculous thing to make a song-n-dance about. Surely there are truths that we dont know (yet)? What of it? Then science studies better... Then some more truths are revealed... etc...

To understand why its a big deal we need to understand the difference between

Analytic and Synthetic Truths

Richard O'Keefe's responses to FP Timeline

Richard O'Keefe of Otago whose quote I started FP Timeline with, wrote me some rather detailed comments about history which have interesting titbits of info.

Functional Programming: A Moving Target

In my last post, I gave a functional programming time line in the last 50 years. Now I'll look at two things: The place of functional in ACM Curriculum 2013 and how C has messed up the notion of functional.

ACM Curriculum 2013

Functional Programming: A Timeline

Rob Hagan at Monash had shown that you could teach students more Cobol with one semester of Scheme and one semester of Cobol than you could with three semesters of Cobol.
Richard O'Keefe on Erlang list

Well that was before Functional Programming hit the headlines.
These days FP is quite a buzzword. Is this for good or bad?
If real world ≡ good well then Scala and Clojure and Erlang and Haskell becoming more and more 'real world' is a wonderful thing.
If what is good is understanding, then I am not so sure. Many things about programming, pedagogy and programming-pedagogy that were widely understood in the 1970s and 80s have mysteriously become un-understood today.
However in this darkening of the age there are some glimmers… eg ACM's 2013 curriculum.
In this post I would like to delineate a timeline of the semantics and significance of Functional in the last 50 years. In subsequent posts I'll try to deconstruct how the semantics has shifted around in this time.

Timeline

1957

The first programming language – Fortran

1957

The first functional programming language – For(mula)Tran(slator)

Why? Whoa! How?

Read on…

Between Poverty and Universality lies Structure

Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself           —  Eric Raymond

In ancient times people set each other puzzles such as:

       Can God make a stone so heavy that he can't lift it?

These puzzles-of-omnipotence can be rephrased in theory-of-computation lingo:

       Can God compute the uncomputable?
       If he can, how is it uncomputable?
       If he cant, how is he God?

So what are those limits of/by structure?  Unsurprisingly related to God-el's theorem:

God-el's Theorem says that for any record player, there are records which it cannot play because they will cause it to self-destruct
Gödel-Escher-Bach

And like record players what about programming languages whose abstractions can be arranged to break the language?

Structure is good because it reduces breakage; its bad because it imprisons us into precooked forms.

Following I explore the space between poverty and universality; a space which for want of a better word I will simply call structure, the most elusive being the structure of syntax.