I was thinking about what’s wrong with Sierra (see my previous post), and I realized that it mostly sounded like someone asked a CS100 student for a list of things they disliked about C. This immediately led me to consider if that’s ever a good idea. Should we ever ask users — especially novice users …
Category Archives: Computer Science
Sierra programming language
I ran across the Sierra Programming Language yesterday on Kickstarter. First, I thought it was odd seeing an open source programming language looking for funding. Most of these projects seemed to move forwards pet projects for some programmer or another. The inventor makes some pretty bold claims (5x-6x faster programming). Then looking at it, a …
Updated my TeX install
Just updated my BasicTeX-2008 install to the 2011 edition. Pretty simple really. I deleted the old installation using: tlmgr uninstall then downloaded the latest incarnation from http://www.tug.org/mactex/2011/morepackages.html, then installed it. I had to update the path in my .tcshrc to point to the new bin directory, and voila! Latest and greatest TeX install. I then …
Computers, Cars, and a Tale of Two Apples
Here’s great article about the ideological path from open computing to computing appliance and the two Steve’s of Apple that were at the vanguard of pushing both ends of that spectrum: Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, and the long road to the iPad. – By Tim Wu – Slate Magazine. I have long contended that computers …
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RobotWar
This 10 top list of computer games includes an honorable mention for RobotWar. I actually discovered RobotWar when my friend Steve Green created a version for X11. While we had a great time coding robots I think the most interesting things was figuring out how Silas Warner managed to program it on an Apple ][. …
Perspectives on Programming
Lately Mike Taylor over at the Reinvigorated Programmer has been on a roll with a couple of interesting blog posts (at least interesting enough to make Slashdot). First he blogged about deterioration of programming into pure drudgery and more recently he’s disagreed with Dijkstra on the value of BASIC as a first programming language. Here …
Upgraded bubbles
A little Photoshop wizardry (courtesy of an online tutorial), and I’ve upgraded the bubbles in my first iPhone application. I need to figure out a real game of some sort to use these in so I can justify putting it on the App Store.
My first iPhone app
I’m still tinkering, but I pretty much just finished my first iPhone app that’s more interesting than a list of text. As I mentioned before, I’m taking the iPhone class at UMD this semester; and this is/was lab #3. Basically it’s just a small app that creates bubbles as you tap the screen, and pops …
iPhone Development Class
I’ve signed up for the iPhone development class we have at UMD at the moment. So far it’s going OK, but I did miss the first week since I was in Pennsylvania. Hopefully, I’ll get motivated, catch up, and eventually put something out through the App Store.
Recommended classes for computer science majors
This semester I am TA’ing a computer systems course. The most common questions I’m getting (aside from project help requests) are regarding classes to take it upcoming semesters. So, to that end, I thought I’d elaborate on my views regarding classes recommended for computer science majors. (I’m couching this discussion in generic terms, but after …
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