HOPLON Infotainment write MMOG’s with Java on a mainframe. More here.
(via IEEE Spectrum Volume 45 Number 8, 2008)
Author: grant
IEEE Spectrum's 10 great tech books
- The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance
- Mirror Worlds: or, The Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox… How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean
- A New Kind of Science
- Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
- Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age
- The Design of Everyday Things
- The Soul of a New Machine
- The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing
- Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time
- The Making of the Atomic Bomb
(via IEEE Spectrum Volume 45, Number 3, 2008)
Math on DVD
Both Joy of Thinking: The Beauty and Power of Classical Mathematical Ideas and the Joy of Mathematics were advertised in the IEEE Spectrum. I am sort of intrigued as to how they go about teaching.
Energiya-Buran: The Soviet Space Shuttle
Energiya-Buran: The Soviet Space Shuttle is a book about the Soviet space shuttle program. In particular it covers the Soviet version of the US space shuttle. This looks like an interesting and fun read.
(via IEEE Spectrum Volume 45 Number 3, 2008)
Moby Scheme
We are delighted to announce the first release of Moby Scheme, a compiler from Beginner Student Language (BSL) + World programs to smartphones. The current prototype compiles to the Android platform, and supports almost all BSL programs as well as libraries to accelerometer, GPS, and SMS functionality.
We are concurrently working on a Web service interface for end-users. If your only goal is to *use* Moby, you can certainly try it out, but the current release assumes you have some developer chops to install and manage packages. We’re hoping, however, that you’ll also want to *contribute*, for which this is your avenue.
(via PLT)
Knights of the Lambda Calculus
The Knights of the Lambda Calculus is a semi-fictional organization of expert LISP and Scheme hackers. The name refers to the lambda calculus, a mathematical formalism invented by Alonzo Church, with which LISP is intimately connected, and references the Knights Templar.
There is no actual organization that goes by the name Knights of the Lambda Calculus; it mostly only exists as a hacker culture in-joke. The concept most likely originated at MIT. For example, in the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs video lectures, one of the lecturers presents the audience with the button, saying they are now members of this special group. However, a “well-known LISPer” has been known to give out buttons with Knights insignia on them, and some people have claimed to have membership in the Knights.
Art and Code and Visualizing Data
I went to two of Ben Fry’s talks at Art and Code, and bought his book Visualizing Data (O’Reilly) and downloaded his dissertation, so I can guess how his presentation went. To get the real flavor of what happens in those first ten minutes, though, besides waiting for the NEU ACM video (great ACM chapter, by the way!), you can also wait for the Art and Code videos, which are not up yet, but will be at some point, here: http://www.vimeo.com/artandcode
(via PLT)
On FP and Graphics Processing
Oddly, graphics processing is very functional, yet procedural languages are used to teach it. In a nutshell, matrices operate on matrices operate … . In between some of the stages, drawing takes place; the rightmost argument is the beginning of the scene. Years ago, I gave up learning OpenGL because it was so tedious. Now that I am enlightened by FP, I understand and enjoy graphics programming so much more that I wrote an API just for the fun of it.
(via PLT)
Thinking twice about performance optimizations
This is a good article that might make you think twice about making performance optimizations in your code. My take is that the author is implying that you only have so much time to work on the code so you should focus on areas where the users will actually appreciate your efforts. That makes sense.
Why MIT switched from Scheme to Python
Costanza asked Sussman why MIT had switched away from Scheme for their introductory programming course, 6.001. This was a gem. He said that the reason that happened was because engineering in 1980 was not what it was in the mid-90s or in 2000. In 1980, good programmers spent a lot of time thinking, and then produced spare code that they thought should work. Code ran close to the metal, even Scheme — it was understandable all the way down. Like a resistor, where you could read the bands and know the power rating and the tolerance and the resistance and V=IR and that’s all there was to know. 6.001 had been conceived to teach engineers how to take small parts that they understood entirely and use simple techniques to compose them into larger things that do what you want.
But programming now isn’t so much like that, said Sussman. Nowadays you muck around with incomprehensible or nonexistent man pages for software you don’t know who wrote. You have to do basic science on your libraries to see how they work, trying out different inputs and seeing how the code reacts. This is a fundamentally different job, and it needed a different course.
So the good thing about the new 6.001 was that it was robot-centered — you had to program a little robot to move around. And robots are not like resistors, behaving according to ideal functions. Wheels slip, the environment changes, etc — you have to build in robustness to the system, in a different way than the one SICP discusses.
And why Python, then? Well, said Sussman, it probably just had a library already implemented for the robotics interface, that was all.
(via wingolog)