The Myth of the Machine

I write a lot of posts for this weblog that never see the light of day. Ecto dutifully saves them for me, and they never hit the WWW. A rambling (and therefore unpublished) post is sitting on the queue re: a paper I just read; I’ll settle for a short post that just points to the paper.

I encountered a paper via Lambda the Ultimate the other day. The Origins of the Turing Thesis Mythacrobat, by Peter Wegner and Dina Goldin, is a clear and concise treatment of the theory of the Turing Machine, and it’s relation to both the computer and other computing paradigms.

This is so timely, considering the SIGCSE paper I’m revising to send out the door. Given the work Christian and I have been doing with the transterpreter, this paper nicely sticks a finger in the dam that holds back a flood of arguments regarding the inherent value and importance of “algorithmic thinking” in the CS1/CS2 curriculum. I look forward to citing it.

I recommended it to the CompEd research group here at Kent, and I recommend it to you. It’s a good read.

20040828 | | Tags: , , , | Comments Closed

Busy

A few projects have been underway at the same time; I’m working on a project for building tutorials in BlueJ, and have continued to occasionally ride co-pilot on this projectacrobat. Given an upcoming holiday (before the term starts), I’m working somewhere around 130% of normal. Not that normal is that slow…

I’m not dead… yet. In more pedestrian news, I suspect CS-ED.org will move to a new host, and an upgrade to MT 3.0 is in the words, although this only effects one participant of CSCS, so… I mean, who really cares, yeah?

Ah. Summer. I remember when that meant town ball and soft-serve ice cream.

20040819 | | Tags: | Comments Closed

Off to London

Christian and I are presenting this evening at the Scheme UK users group meeting. Although our presentation isn’t exactly Scheme, there are some Schemely bits. This presentation is based on the paper we wroteacrobat for CPA 2004; this trip can be considered both a warm-up for CPA, and a chance to test out some ideas for a SIGCSE paper at the end of the month.

Did I say I was tired? I’m tired.

20040811 | | Tags: , | 2 Comments »

AppleScript makes me angry

Somehow, the Script Editor application (that ships with OS X) allowed me to save my only copy of an AppleScript I’ve been working on all weekend as a “Run-Only” script.

Now, I have a script that needed a little more tweaking in a “run-only” format, and I have no way (as far as I know) to recover the original source code.

This is unacceptable. There is no way in hell a code editor should allow you to obliterate the source code without so much as a warning. Granted, I have no idea what I’m doing with either A) AppleScript or B) Script Editor, but as a reasonably accomplished programmer in a few other languages and environments, I don’t see why this should be such an ass-backwards environment.

Someone at Apple: fix Script Editor. That isn’t permissible behaviour, probably even under your own usability guidelines.

20040808 | | Tags: | Comments Closed

My dream office

dream_office

There’s an attribution that’s forthcoming on this, and a good story. All in good time.

How sweet would that be? A tree-house office!

20040806 | | Tags: , , , , | 1 Comment »