The best way to design a course is to describe the things students will be able to do when it’s over; the best way to do that is to specify graduation exercises. Ours are listed in the <a href=”http://softwarecarpentry.wordpress.com/goals/”>Goals</a> page on the new <a href=”http://softwarecarpentry.wordpress.com”>Software Carpentry</a> blog. We would be grateful for feedback: are these the things you want to be able to do? What did we forget? What could we take out to make room for things you care about more? Please leave your comments on the page itself; we’ll update it regularly based on what you say.
Software Carpentry
Angel: People who don’t care about anything will never understand the people who do.
Marcus Hamilton: Yeah, but we won’t care.
On the one hand, I am disgusted by people who continue to claim that vaccines cause autism. On the other hand, given stories like this one about Merck trying to bury the impact of Vioxx on heart failure, it’s no wonder that people don’t trust scientists. Because after all, “Merck” is a legal fiction: it was the people working there who decided that the truth was less important than the corporate bottom line. Every time a doctor or scientist acts unethically, they make it harder for those who are being honest to be heard.
Uncategorized
Two recent posts that highlight what “community” means to me:
- David Crow writes about Workbrain‘s children: companies like Dayforce and Rypple that have their roots in Workbrain, and that will themselves probably one day spawn other companies.
- Down in Kensington Market, the Hacklab crew are having fun doing micrometer-scale engraving with a 50 picoamp focused ion beam.
What ties them together is their openness. Despite having a company to get off the ground, Rypple’s Daniel Debow comes in to talk to my undergrad classes whenever I ask him to. Meanwhile, anyone—hell, any thing—that thnks bathtub lasers are cool would be welcome at the Hacklab. Community is knowing that a whole bunch of people will say, “The answer is yes—now, what was the question?”
Now, how do we connect students who are juggling assignments in five courses with local communities, without them having to sacrifice their grades?
Teaching
Nice post from Smartbear’s Jason Cohen—everyone starting a business (or a graduate degree) should take it to heart.
Uncategorized
Andrew Trusty’s PubFeed project is now on the web at http://pubfeed.cs.toronto.edu/, and he’s looking for people to try it out. PubFeed watches academic aggregators like Google Scholar for papers that meet your criteria and notifies you when they’re published—think of it as “Save my query and tell me when there’s a match.” Neat idea; he’d welcome feedback.
Research
Interesting talk from Magnus Christerson and Shane Clifford about intentional programming (Charles Simonyi‘s “next big thing”). Starts a bit slowly, then accelerates; I particularly liked the off-hand characterization of all of today’s widely-used languages as glorified punch cards. I think—I hope—that the demo starting around 14:00 is a glimpse of the future of programming.
Coincidentally, I also finally had time to read up on Pig, the Apache Hadoop project’s equivalent of Google’s Sawzall language for working with very large data sets—both are essentially “what we should do these days instead of SQL”. Interesting to think about how domain-specific languages like this will proliferate and interoperate if the intentional/extensible folks are right.
Until then, there’s Vimperator… 
Extensible Programming, Research
There’s a new post on the Software Carpentry blog about what the people supervising computational research need to know. Comments there would be greatly appreciated. (Note: I’ll keep posting notices here about posts there for another month or two, just to give everyone who cares a chance to update their links.)
Software Carpentry
Summer of Code studentships for 2009 were announced today; only one of the six projects I was involved in was accepted (Siddhant Goel’s bid to extend the PyVCAL version control abstraction library). Application numbers were down slightly from last year, but the general consensus is that the quality went up quite a bit. Kudos to Google once again for giving so much back to the community.
Uncategorized
From Caterina Fake’s photostream:
Uncategorized
My colleague Jordi Cabot has a new site up called Modeling Languages. As the intro says:
Modeling is supposed to be one of the most important activities in any software development process. At least this is the general understanding within the software engineering research community. However, in the day-to-day practice, modeling is usually regarded as, basically, a waste of time.
Regular readers will know that the gap between academic theory and industrial practice in this area is one of my pet obsessions (for the record, I’m on the side of working programmers). Please check out the site and join the discussion.
Announcements, Research
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