A Computer Literacy interview with Donald Knuth

A couple of days back, googling some time away while waiting for a flight at the airport, I happened to glean across an interview with Donald Knuth. It was taken around 1993 by Computer Literacy after the publication of his books on CWEB and The Stanford Graphbase. Besides talking about the obvious topics that you would expect out of a Knuth session, he also ruminates on his many other passions like music, piano and writing. We all know Knuth's obsession with TeX and METAFONT. But did you know that the Father of Analysis of Algorithms is an expert in piano music ? He says :

I would like to have friends come to the house and play four-hands piano music. If I could do it every week, I would. I hope to live long enough so that after I've finished my life's work on The Art of Computer Programming, I might compose some music. Just a dream... it might be lousy music, of course.

Go, read the whole piece .. it's a wonderful read about some of the thoughts of the legend.

Is the Java Culture changing ?

Came across a reference to this slightly old artima post through an unlikely source - a posting by Paul Graham in a discussion thread on lightweight programming languages. The weblog quotes Gilad Bracha defining Java Culture in the context of explaining why hygienic macros should not be added to the Java programming language ..

The advantages of Java is that it easily serves as a lingua franca - everyone can read a Java program and understand what is going on. User defined macros destroy that property. Every installation or project can (and will) define its own set of macros, that make their programs unreadable for everyone else. Programming languages are cultural artifacts, and their success (i.e., widespread adoption) is critically dependent on cultural factors as well as technical ones. .. Most Java developers are happy to have dedicated, narrowly focused solutions that are tailored to a specific problem. I am keenly aware of the drawbacks of such an approach, but I don't see it changing very quickly.

Does this mean lesser power in abstraction and dumbing down programmers in an attempt to get a wider audience for your language (aka Language For the Masses - LFM) ? Paul Graham, in one of his rants against OO, mentions about the pack-programming world of discipline-imposing languages being oriented to social packs.

Do you think we are going through a change in the Java Culture and that Sun has changed its position on LFM over the last couple of years ? And how much it has got to do with the Ruby (r)evolution ? We have had the whole slew of features in Java 5 and now we are talking about adding on closures in the language and tail calls and tuples in the VM ..

Can you differentiate between an Abstraction and a Lie ?

In the June 2007 issue of Communications of the ACM, David Parnas differentiates between an abstraction and a lie. He mentions that abstractions that embody unrealistic assumptions represent nothing at all. He learnt the correct definition of abstraction from the late E. W. Dijkstra :

An abstraction is one thing that represents several real things equally well.

And he concludes ..

Finding the simplest model that is not a lie is the key to better software design.

So true, and how lucidly expressed! Go read the full article here. [Membership required for full text].

How do you define a Programmer ?

Stu writes :

I want to live in a world where language preference does not define a programmer. We'll write code in Ruby, or Scheme, or Scala, or Erlang. And we can all live in harmony on a JVM anywhere.

Wishful thinking! Add to this list .. Groovy, Scala and of course Java. I am sure this calls for a big change in the dynamics which control the programmer hiring and project staffing ecosystem today. And spare a thought for the team who will maintain all these codes many years after they have been written, refactored and refactored mercilessly.

Where are we headed to ?

Programming Passion and the FizzBuzz Madness

Of late there have been lots of buzzing around with FizzBuzz in many of the programming blogs. It all started with Imran on Tech posing the following fizzbuzz question to interview developers who grok coding ..

Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print “Fizz” instead of the number and for the multiples of five print “Buzz”. For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print “FizzBuzz”.

The programming community took it up from there and started a deluge of self proclamation trying to establish the most efficient way of FizzBuzzing. Have a look at the comments section of all these blogs - passionate programmers have used all *official* languages to get their version of FizzBuzz going.

And the madness continues .. someone positions FizzBuzz as the the programming task of choice for discriminating hackers. And guess what ? One hacker responded with a Ruby code interpreting Prolog interpreting Lisp interpreting Lisp solving FizzBuzz.

The intent of the initial post was definitely to bring into light some of the concerns and issues that interviewers face hiring good programmers. The community responded otherwise, as Giles Bowkett aptly mentions ..

if you were absurdly cynical, you might expect programmers to start coding FizzBuzz in every language from Haskell to SQL, and even to start holding FizzBuzz coding contests.

Are programmers by nature too passionate ? I guess yes, and that is why we find such madness in the community when someone throws in some problem which has a programming smell. But is this passion justified ? Now, this is cynical, since you can never justify passion. But I think we would have been much more pragmatic focusing on the main problem that Imran on Tech had raised - the issue of hiring good programmers through a pragmatic process of interviewing. Is asking candidates to solve screening programming assignments the right way to judge a programmer in an interview ? We follow these practices rampantly, we eliminate candidates through FizzBuzz problems, yet many of the software projects fail because of bad programming and inefficient programmers. Isn't it time we step back and introspect ? Have a look at this heartfelt critique of the FizzBuzz screening question .. (reference from RaganWorld)

2006 - My Favorite Picks from the Blogosphere

Oh it's that time of the continuum when we look back at the passing of one more year and contemplate what it meant to each one of us in the broader spectrum of life. I am not trying to be cynical or delve into the psyco-analysis of what went wrong in the last 365 days of the calendar .. Here is a peek to my-best-of-2006 from the blogosphere ..

In no particular order ::

Stevey's Good Agile, Bad Agile

For all agilists, the party is over. Steve Yeggey is on song tearing apart the agile purists with the good-agile of Google. Great read.

Sriram's Lisp is Sin

A fascinating walk down the road of the language of Gods. This post has been discussed in various forums by a multitude of Lisp practitioners.

Joel's Development Abstraction Layer

A programmer's sole activity is to produce beautiful code, but it needs layers of abstraction from the organization to create a software product out of it in the market. He concludes with an analogy of Dolly Parton's performance being supported by the leakproof abstractions provided by the incredible infrastructure of managers, musicians, recording technicians, record companies, roadies, hairdressers, and publicists behind her.

Jao's Category Theory with Bananas

A very good introduction to category theory in programming languages.

Ola Bini on The Dark Ages of programming languages

Ola Bini's search continues for the next programming language that does not suck - very well written by one of the prolific programmers of today.

Another Joel's Gem : Can your Programming Language Do This ?

An eye opener to all schools who have started teaching Java as the first programming language. Once again Joel highlights the importance of functional programming through evangelizing the map/reduce techniques.

Personally ...

2006 was the year when

• I started blogging - two months down the line I will be celebrating the first anniversary of my Ruminations blog.



• I attended the first JavaOne of my life - it was exciting to be among the millions of Java programmers swarming inside the Moscone Center.



• I made my first venture into the Ruby land and lived up to a promise that I will learn at least one new programming language this year. Incidentally I have also started playing around with Scala .. my initial impressions are very good. 2007 will definitely see me closer to the languages of the Gods, to rediscover the joy of programming.



• I finally came out of the EJB fiasco and dug deep into the Spring experience, along with the usual accompaniments of Hibernate and the rest of the lightweight stack elements. EJB3 is better than EJB2, but Spring is way ahead.



• I became a huge fan of AOP.

That's all, folks. Would be eager to hear out from all of you about any of your interesting reads in 2006. Finally, I would like to sign off 2006 with the following revelation from Paul Graham :

The pointy-haired boss is a manager who doesn't program. So the surest way to avoid becoming him is to stay a programmer. What tempts programmers to become managers are companies with old-fashioned corporate structure, where the only way to advance in salary and prestige is to go into management. So if you want to avoid becoming a PHB, avoid such companies, and work for (or start) startups.

There's the spirit, that's the spirit, the spirit of a programmer - be a programmer, remain a programmer and have respect for hacker oriented programming languages (aka Lisp). My goal for 2007 - to get more enlightened into the eval land, which John McCarthy laid out way back in the 1960s.

Happy Holidays !!