I started to listen to the first SICP lecture ¹. SICP is one of the best books on computer science I know. See ProgrammingBooks.
What is programming? I tried to answer that on 2004-10-11 Software. The lecture starts out by saying that computer science is about *processes* – instead of studying what is true (eg. geometry), it’s the study of *how-to* do things. Like cooking instructions (one of my favorite images for laymen). Except that they are long. Not just a few pages – stacks *meters* high. Abelson calls these *procedures* – how to do things. And the lecture says that computer science is there to help us: Its the *techniques* that help us control the complexities of these very big cooking instructions. And he says what our problem is: Programs work in a virtual space. There is no physics to help us, no natural laws.
I remember saying that to people claiming that software engineering was full of fools because software quality was so low. But the point is, building software is hard, because programming is easy: In programming, we can program whatever junk we want. No parts of you program ever fall down. No parts of you program ever whither when the sun shines, nor do they ever changes when it rains. They require no food, no air, no space, they never fall sick, and they don’t breed. And we can build a lot more junk by programming than we could in real life. The only test is running the code. *Then* we’ll see whether it works or crashes.
#Books #Software
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Hi Alex,
Thanks for that link. I loved the lecture. Would listen to the rest of them too.
– Anonymous 2004-10-17 23:58 UTC