That Brian Brain Again

An old debate in CS (going back to Cobol vs. Fortran and never resolved) on "minimal" vs. "humane" vocabulary and syntax of languages gets an actual treatment in: The Nexus of Guts and Glitz: At first blush, this would seem any easy call. My Smalltalk roots (among other things) are likely showing when I say I see no harm in a larger, more expressive vocabulary.

Now the reader need not fear, for I still intend to cast my lot on the side of the humane, and not the stingy, though when the argument is cast in such terms, it is hard not to feel a tad manipulated, and after all, smaller can be simpler, I suppose... To be anti-humane is to be in favor of what? Euthanizing kittens? ...

(Ahem, to all my knowledge this is the first time that any form of cat content appears in my log save for the headerNav where I have 2 since this Xmas. Did it have to be like so? I guess I earned it in some kind of really bad former life. I'm sorry)

But seriously: layering in abstraction, vocabulary, tightness, robustness and so on in SW development is an old proposition and the balance has to be redefined all the time.

But then, as we heard both Adele Goldberg and Dave Thomas complain about declining levels in math understanding being a large problem in SW culture, it seems better education in that field has to be taken on again, in a way that holds after the end of school and/or the first two semesters. Alan Kay has a modest little piece on that in Squeakland.

Kentaro Yoshimasa uses Squeak eToy to enhance math and science education

motz has a snippet and links Joel Spolsky on an aspect of this. I am stupid and impudent enough to think Joel on Software's analytics are wrong.

Chris has a piece on more advanced stuff (parallelism) that's got to do with yet different developments and the heritage of APL, a language that can do a lot, is definitely on the more terse side of interface and "requires as Chris quotes the Swiss APL User Group the ability of the programmer to mathematically analyse the problems on a high level" to be full used. So for the educated there are still fields to prove their smart abstraction abilities. If you are interested in history, follow his LTU link.

Addendum: Brian's newest post is a link to the reconstructed complete and definitive interview with Carver Mead. Interested in science and human progress? Please go ahead, enjoy!