Great post from David Humphrey about teaching his children what makes a computer go. I still don’t know my way around their insides (computers, I mean, not children); maybe I’ll get to learn along with Maddie.
)I now have two blogs up at WordPress: one for the cross-country undergrad projects I’m coordinating (http://ucosp.wordpress.com), the other for Software Carpentry stuff (http://softwarecarpentry.wordpress.com). I’ll try to remember to post summaries here from time to time of what’s happening there:
UCOSP:
Software Carpentry:
We are very pleased to announce the release of Version 0.5 of Basie, a lightweight software project forge built on Django that borrows many ideas from Trac and DrProject. As this screencast shows, its features include:
Basie is still very much a work in progress (we picked “0.5″ as a version number because we figure it’s halfway done ), but we are very pleased with how it’s coming along, and invite anyone who is interested in trying it out, or helping with its development, to get in touch.
As a follow-up to our paper on software project portals, Jordi Cabot has started a discussion at Joel on Software:
…the (small) teams building these portals do not use agile methodologies themselves, but instead rely on informal collections of best practices….I’d like to know if the same behaviour can be found among mISVs: Are any of you following a specific (agile) method in the development of your products? Or it is more about improvising and working on what it seems best at any given time? (given the small size of the team, just 1 in many cases, and its expertise). Maybe not even agile methods are “agile” enough for this kind of teams?
The comments are interesting; lots here to chew on.
Via Nature‘s “Great Beyond”, this story from the Los Angeles Times:
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce…wants to put the science of climate change on trial… The chamber is pushing for the Environmental Protection Agency to hold a public hearing — with witnesses, cross-examinations and a judge to rule on whether humans are causing global warming… [Its] goal…is to guard against potential emissions regulations by undermining the scientific consensus on climate change.
Not “show us in a forum we’re familiar with that this is really happening”, which I would understand, but “give us a chance to undermine the scientific consensus using the tricks that we know best”. Don’t they ever wonder whether their children will forgive them?
In response to a question about what it’s been like switching to Python as a first-year programming language, Paul Gries wrote the following. It might be of interest to other instructors who are thinking of changing over.
And in related news, we’re compiling errata and solutions to even-numbered exercises for a fresh printing of Practical Programming. We’re pleased with how well it’s doing; in particular, we’ve been pleasantly surprised by the number of inquiries we’ve had from people who are home schooling. If you have questions, suggestions, or experiences to share, we’d love to hear from you.
We love most of Python, especially the clean, readable, minimal syntax. However, there are several Python gotchas, and we were bitten by almost all of them. Here are some of the major ones that confused either students or instructors:
# Example 1
i = 1
def f():
print i
f()
print i
|
# Example 2
i = 1
def g():
i = 2
print i
g()
print i
|
# Example 3
i = 1
def h():
print i
i = 2
print i
h()
print i
|
On the positive side, some students LOVE putting functions into dictionaries and getting rid of huge if/else statements. They also find passing functions as parameters to be natural; we introduce this idea to write a timing function that returns how long its argument runs. This is a lovely thing to do when we get to searching and sorting.
In CS2, we’re struggling with how much information hiding to do; we’re conflicted about whether __var plus set_ and get_ helpers is what we should do or if we should get into properties. We’re leaning toward the former, but we’re not certain.
For their thesis projects, two of my graduate students are studying what programmers actually do when developing software. I can’t give you more details than that without biasing their studies, but what I can tell you is that they’re looking for Java coders with at least 3-4 years of full-time industry experience who’d be willing to give them an hour or so. No electrodes involved, and you’d help science move forward in a small way. If you’re willing, and in the Greater Toronto Area, please give me a shout and I’ll hook you up.
From Lambda the Ultimate:
According to a draft statement, Scheme is to be split into a small and a large language, the small being designed for educators and “50-page purists”, the large for “programmers, implementors”.
Part of me says, “If you think purists and programmers belong in two different camps, you’re doing more harm than good.” The rest of me says, “Isn’t it a shame that every useful programming language eventually has to make this distinction?”
One by one and two by two our summer students are wrapping up:
I’ll post more as they come in. Well done, everyone—it’s been a great four months.
Uncategorized
Recent Comments