TITLE: Digital Cameras, Electric Guitars, and Programming
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: July 26, 2010 3:28 PM
DESC:
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BODY:
I often write here about
programming for everyone,
or
at least for certain users.
Won't that put professional programmers out of business?
Here is a
great answer to a related question
from a screenwriter using an analogy to music:
Well, if I gave you an electric guitar, would you
instantly become Eric Clapton?
There is always room for specialists and artists, people
who take literacy to a higher level. We all can write
a little bit, and pretty soon everyone will be blogging,
tweeting, or Facebooking, but we still need
Shakespeare,
James Joyce,
and
Kurt Vonnegut.
There is more to writing than letters and sentences. There
is more to programming than tokens and procedures. A person
with ideas can create things we want to read and use.
Sometimes the idea is as simple as hooking up two existing
ideas. I may be late to the party, but
@bc_l
is simply too cool:
I'm GNU bc on
twitter! DM me your math and I'll tell you the answer. (by
@hmason)
@hmason is awesome.
On a more practical note, I use
dc
as the target language for a simple demo compiler in my
compilers course, following the lead of Fischer, Cytron, and
LeBlanc in Crafting a Compiler. I'm considering
using the new edition of this text in my course this fall,
in part because of its support for virtual machines as
targets and especially the JVM. I like where my course has
been the last couple of offerings, but this seems like an
overdue change in my course's content. I may as well start
moving the course. Eventually, targeting multi-core
architectures will be essential.
If I want to help students who dream of being Eric Clapton
with a keyboard, I gotta keep moving.
~~~~
(The image above is courtesy of
PedalFreak at flickr,
with a
Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic
license.)
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