Re: What is different with Python ? (OT I guess)
On Thu, 16 Jun 2005 14:29:49 +0100, rumours say that Tom Anderson [EMAIL PROTECTED] might have written: At one point, a friend and i founded a university to give our recreational random hackery a bit more credibility (well, we called ourself a university, anyway; it was mostly a joke). We called the programming department 'Executable Poetry'. That's a good idea for a t-shirt: Python: executable poetry (kudos to Steve Holden for [EMAIL PROTECTED] where the term PIPO (Poetry In, Poetry Out) could be born) and then, apart from t-shirts, the PSF could sell Python-branded shampoos named poetry in lotion etc. -- TZOTZIOY, I speak England very best. Dear Paul, please stop spamming us. The Corinthians -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
[OT] Re: What is different with Python ? (OT I guess)
Christos TZOTZIOY Georgiou wrote: and then, apart from t-shirts, the PSF could sell Python-branded shampoos named poetry in lotion etc. Which will once and for all solve the dandruffs problem prevalent among the snake community these days. Not funny? know then that German has one term for both 'dandruff' and 'scale' (Schuppe). Still not funny? at least you have learned some German. Peter -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: What is different with Python ? (OT I guess)
On Tue, 28 Jun 2005 15:46:01 +0300, rumours say that Christos TZOTZIOY Georgiou [EMAIL PROTECTED] might have written: (kudos to Steve Holden for [EMAIL PROTECTED] where the term PIPO (Poetry In, Poetry Out) could be born) oops! kudos to Michael Spencer (I never saw Michael's message on my newsserver, so I archived Steve's). -- TZOTZIOY, I speak England very best. Dear Paul, please stop spamming us. The Corinthians -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: [OT] Re: What is different with Python ? (OT I guess)
Peter Otten wrote: Christos TZOTZIOY Georgiou wrote: and then, apart from t-shirts, the PSF could sell Python-branded shampoos named poetry in lotion etc. Which will once and for all solve the dandruffs problem prevalent among the snake community these days. And once again the Pythonistas will be known as snake-oil salesmen. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: What is different with Python ? (OT I guess)
On Wed, 15 Jun 2005, Terry Hancock wrote: On Tuesday 14 June 2005 08:12 am, Magnus Lycka wrote: Oh well, I guess it's a bit late to try to rename the Computer Science discipline now. Computer programming is a trade skill, not a science. It's like being a machinist or a carpenter --- a practical art. A lot of universities teach 'software engineering'. I draw a distinction between this and real computer science - computer science is the abstract, mathematical stuff, where you learn to prove your programs correct, whereas software engineering is more practical, where you just learn to write programs that work. Of course, CS does have quite a practical element, and SE has plenty of theory behind it, but they differ in emphasis. SE departments tend to grow out of electronics engineering departments; CS departments tend to bud off from maths departments. Unfortunately, our society has a very denigrative view of craftsmen, and does not pay them well enough, so computer programmers have been motivated to attempt to elevate the profession by using the appellative of science. How different would the world be if we (more accurately) called it Computer Arts? At one point, a friend and i founded a university to give our recreational random hackery a bit more credibility (well, we called ourself a university, anyway; it was mostly a joke). We called the programming department 'Executable Poetry'. tom -- Punk's not sexual, it's just aggression. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: What is different with Python ? (OT I guess)
On Tuesday 14 June 2005 10:21 am, Scott David Daniels wrote: Oh well, I guess it's a bit late to try to rename the Computer Science discipline now. The best I've heard is Informatics -- I have a vague impression that this is a more European name for the field. It's the reverse-translation from the French Informatique. -- Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com ) Anansi Spaceworks http://www.anansispaceworks.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: What is different with Python ? (OT I guess)
On Tuesday 14 June 2005 08:12 am, Magnus Lycka wrote: Oh well, I guess it's a bit late to try to rename the Computer Science discipline now. Computer programming is a trade skill, not a science. It's like being a machinist or a carpenter --- a practical art. Unfortunately, our society has a very denigrative view of craftsmen, and does not pay them well enough, so computer programmers have been motivated to attempt to elevate the profession by using the appellative of science. How different would the world be if we (more accurately) called it Computer Arts? -- Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com ) Anansi Spaceworks http://www.anansispaceworks.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: What is different with Python ? (OT I guess)
Terry Hancock ha scritto: It's the reverse-translation from the French Informatique. Or maybe the italian Informatica... -- Renato Usi Fedora? Fai un salto da noi: http://www.fedoraitalia.org -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: What is different with Python ? (OT I guess)
Oh well, I guess it's a bit late to try to rename the Computer Science discipline now. The best I've heard is Informatics -- I have a vague impression that this is a more European name for the field. The word Informatics had been invented by a Soviet computer scientist Andrey Ershov several decades ago as a name for his view on Information Theory. In Russian, it is , Informatika, by analogy with Mathematics, . It is widely used ever since both in russian-language literature and in many other languages and countries. It is a better name than either Information Theory or Computer Science for the discipline. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: What is different with Python ? (OT I guess)
On 6/14/05, Magnus Lycka [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Andrew Dalke wrote: Andrea Griffini wrote: This is investigating. Programming is more similar to building instead (with a very few exceptions). CS is not like physics or chemistry or biology where you're given a result (the world) and you're looking for the unknown laws. In programming *we* are building the world. This is a huge fundamental difference! Philosophically I disagree. Biology and physics depends on models of how the world works. The success of a model depends on how well it describes and predicts what's observed. Programming too has its model of how things work; you've mentioned algorithmic complexity and there are models of how humans interact with computers. The success depends in part on how well it fits with those models. And this is different from building? I don't disagree with the other things you say, but I think Andrea is right here, although I might have said construction or engineering rather than building. To program is to build. While scientists do build and create things, the ultimate goal of science is understanding. Scientists build so that they can learn. Programmers and engineers learn so that they can build. snip stuff I agree with It seems to me that *real* computer scientists are very rare. I'd like to say that I think that they do, in fact, exist, and that it's a group which should grow and begin to do things more like their biological counterparts. Why? Because, as systems get more complex, they must be studied like biological systems. I spent a while in college studying latent semantic indexing (LSI) [1], which is an algorithm that can be used to group things for clustering, searching, and other uses. It is known *to* be effective in some circumstances, but nobody (at least when I was studying it ~2 years ago) knows *why* it is effective. With the help of my professor, I was helping to try and determine that *why*. We had a hypothesis [2], and my job was basically to build experiments to test our hypothesis. First, I built a framework to perform LSI on arbitrary documents (in python of course, let's keep it on topic :), then I started to do experiments on different bodies of text and different variations of our hypothesis. I kept a lab journal detailing what I had changed between experiments, some of which took days to run. I believe that there are at least a fair number of computer scientists working like this, and I believe that they need to recognize themselves as a separate discipline with separate rules. I'd like to see them open source their code when they publish papers as a matter of standard procedure. I'd like to see them publish reports much more like biologists than like mathematicians. In this way, I think that the scientific computer scientists could begin to become more like real scientists than like engineers. Just my 2 cents. Peace Bill Mill [1] http://javelina.cet.middlebury.edu/lsa/out/lsa_definition.htm [2] http://llimllib.f2o.org/files/lsi_paper.pdf -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: What is different with Python ? (OT I guess)
Magnus Lycka: While scientists do build and create things, the ultimate goal of science is understanding. Scientists build so that they can learn. Programmers and engineers learn so that they can build. Well put! I am going to add this to my list of citations :) Michele Simionato -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: What is different with Python ? (OT I guess)
Scott David Daniels wrote: Magnus Lycka wrote: It seems to me that *real* computer scientists are very rare. I suspect the analysis of algorithms people are among that group. It is intriguing to me when you can determine a lower and upper bound on the time for the best solution to a problem relatively independent of the particular solution. On the other hand, you could argue that algorithms and mathematics are branches of philosophy rather than science. :) Very useful for science, just as many other parts of philosophy, but algorithms are really abstract concepts that stand on their own, regardless of the physical world. But perhaps that distinction is fuzzy. After all, all philosophical theories rest on observations of the world, just as scientific theories. Hm...we're really far off topic now. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
