[erlang-questions] Rhetorical structure of code: Anyone interested in collaborating?

Thu May 5 17:49:59 CEST 2016

Shoot - I'm getting sucked into this increasingly off topic thread.
It's great - I love it, but I know there are folks here who would
prefer to read discussions about the maps module. To those, forgive me
- I need to vent here.

I've absolutely _loved_ computers from the age of 9 when my Dad got me
a Commodore 64. When I went to college I knew I'd be programming one
way or another my whole life so I focused on anything _but_ computers
- Economics, music, math, religious history, etc.

But I did take some computer science courses - and was privileged to
study at Edinburgh in both their AI and CS departments.

These programs kicked the snot out of me. We used ML, C, and
Assembler. I drowned there. Everyone else seemed to get it and I was
lost. I wanted to drop out but stubbornly continued to get smacked
around. My grades were finally just okay and I never felt like I
conquered anything.

I honestly can't imagine calling myself a programmer without having
gone through that. That was not Googling Stack Exchange. There were no
solutions to steal. It completely sucked. I was a complete idiot. But
I learned the fundamentals of this work _and use them every day I sit
down with a computer_.

This is not a "back in my day" thing. This is teaching reality. Fing
hell, poking around at something you don't understand?? Preparing
people to excel at horrible jobs??

Someone just asked me on Twitter, what's the alternative to that in
education these days? Wow, that's a terrifying question, that it can
even be asked seriously.

On Thu, May 5, 2016 at 10:15 AM, Garrett Smith <g@REDACTED> wrote:
> I can't even believe I read that - is that article a troll? It's very
> convincing, apart from the content.
>
> On Thu, May 5, 2016 at 10:04 AM, Garrett Smith <g@REDACTED> wrote:
>> I was initially excited to read what great breakthroughs in
>> teaching/learning methods this piece would reveal.
>>
>> But it's just terribly sad. If programming was poking at things I
>> didn't understand - in Python moreover - boy I'd be in another
>> profession. I feel bad for those students.
>>
>> On Thu, May 5, 2016 at 9:51 AM, Lloyd R. Prentice <lloyd@REDACTED> wrote:
>>> Pertinent to the discussion:
>>>
>>> PROGRAMMING BY POKING: WHY MIT STOPPED TEACHING SICP
>>>
>>>  http://www.posteriorscience.net/?p=206
>>>
>>> Best wishes,
>>>
>>> LRP
>>>
>>> Sent from my iPad
>>>
>>> On May 5, 2016, at 6:07 AM, Vlad Dumitrescu <vladdu55@REDACTED> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Thu, May 5, 2016 at 1:19 AM, Richard A. O'Keefe <ok@REDACTED>
>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On 4/05/16 6:49 PM, Vlad Dumitrescu wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> I don't disagree with you, it's just that for projects larger than toys,
>>>>> I don't know how to browse the history for something that i don't know what
>>>>> it looks like and that might or might not be there. Taking erlide as an
>>>>> example, there are 6000 files in 7000 commits in the main branch, going back
>>>>> 13-14 years and if i would have saved all experiments I'd probably have a
>>>>> tree of at least 5 times that much. I am certain that I wouldn't be able to
>>>>> find anything faster than I would write it again from scratch.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> With 6000 files of totally unfamiliar code, there's no way I could find
>>>> anything without a map and ground approach radar.  (find . -type -f -print
>>>> |
>>>> wc  actually counts 2774 files; it did report 6186 before I got rid of all
>>>> the '._*' junk files you get on a Mac.)  OK, so 1344 Java files, 38 Erlang
>>>> files, 2 Ruby files, 1 XSLT file, and 50-odd Xtend files (which I can't
>>>> read
>>>> yet), even hamcrest (oh don't get me started on hamcrest)...
>>>
>>>
>>> Yeah, I think I forgot to filter out the binary files. Anyway, the point was
>>> that at that size, having a multitude of alternative histories, many of
>>> which might not be relevant at all any more, it gets exponentially harder to
>>> be able to find anything in there.
>>>
>>>>
>>>> With the ._* junk removed, I measure 33.6 MB.  This one Eclipse plugin
>>>> is bigger than the whole Quintus Prolog system, including manuals.
>>>>
>>>> Not only that, it's more than half the size of Pharo, which is a complete
>>>> Smalltalk system including the refactoring browser.  There seems to be
>>>> something about Java that forces systems to grow exceeding large.
>>>
>>>
>>> Yes, and most of the important stuff (the Erlang implementation of the
>>> kernel functionality) is located in another repository. I also had to
>>> include some third party libraries as sources, in order to not depend on
>>> external stuff whose availability was unreliable.
>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> We would need an index of the important experiments, with a reason why
>>>>> they didn't were chosen for implementation and maybe a brief description of
>>>>> the design, and a reference to the commits. This requires a lot of
>>>>> discipline to maintain (especially when a team is working on the project,
>>>>> with each person doing its own experiments).
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Such a thing would, however, be extraordinarily useful for someone in my
>>>> position, with NO idea of where to look for ANYTHING, and a dead link to
>>>> documentation.  The README.md file contains this line:
>>>>
>>>>     Documentation may be found at
>>>>     [the project site](http://erlide.org/erlide.html).
>>>>
>>>> That site isn't supposed to expire until next year, but right now it's not
>>>> accessible. So yeah, I'd find lots of history very helpful. And lots of
>>>>
>>>> advice for the traveller.
>>>
>>>
>>> Thanks for pointing that out, I fixed the link. I will try to keep such a
>>> high-level history from now on, I'm sure there will be a lot to learn for
>>> myself too.
>>>
>>> best regards,
>>> Vlad
>>>
>>>
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