Computer Science

Addison (Church’s son in-law) to Church: Dear Professor Church, Russell had the iota operator, Hilbert had the epsilon operator. Why did you choose lambda for your operator? Church to Addison: eeny, meeny, miny, moe

Computer science is a science of abstraction—creating the right model for a problem and devising the appropriate mechanizable techniques to solve it. — Alfred V. Aho

There are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things. — Phil Karlton, formerly of Xerox PARC, DEC, SGI, and Netscape There are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors. — Leon Bambrick, https://secretgeek.net/

“As a slow-witted human being I have a very small head and I had better learn to live with it and to respect my limitations and give them full credit, rather than try to ignore them, for the latter vain effort will be punished by failure.” — Edsger W. Dijkstra, in Structured Programming (1972)

Among all the other things I have on my plate, this summer I’ll be coding a simulator for a combinatorial architecture proposed back in 1998 by Berkovitch and Berkovitch. Their paper “presents a new principle for microprocessor design based on a pairwise-balanced combinatorial arrangement of processing and memory elements.” This was suggested to me by Prof Alan Ling. Just an exercise at this point. Should be fun. ;) [1] E. Berkovitch and S. ... Read more …

I’m working my way through this and will spend more time on it this weekend. Certainly I’m not qualified to judge, but there are some interesting bits to ponder. A Solution of the P versus NP Problem Fortnow, Lipton, Aaronson have all given a preliminary thumbs down without providing specifics. The next few days should be interesting. Chances are, of course, that it’ll get shot down. For others not hip to the significance of this, here’s the tl;dr: Hard unsolved problem in computer science with important implications. ... Read more …

C++ is like an octopus made by nailing extra legs onto a dog. — Steve Taylor The C language combines the power and flexibility of assembly language with the ease and readability of assembly language. — Unknown

How do we convince people that in programming simplicity and clarity — in short: what mathematicians call “elegance”— are not a dispensable luxury, but a crucial matter that decides between success and failure?

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.