March 29, 2017 4:16 PM

Working Through A Problem Manually

This week, I have been enjoying Eli Bendersky's two-article series "Adventures in JIT Compilation":

Next I'll follow his suggestion and read the shorter How to JIT - An Introduction.

Bendersky is a good teacher, at least in the written form, and I am picking up a lot of ideas for my courses in programming languages and compilers. I recommend his articles and his code highly.

In Part 2, Bendersky says something that made me think of my students:

One of my guiding principles through the field of programming is that before diving into the possible solutions for a problem (for example, some library for doing X) it's worth working through the problem manually first (doing X by hand, without libraries). Grinding your teeth over issues for a while is the best way to appreciate what the shrinkwrapped solution/library does for you.

The presence or absence of this attitude is one of the crucial separators among CS students. Some students come into the program with this mindset already in place, and they are often the ones who advance most quickly in the early courses. Other students don't have this mindset, either by interest or by temperament. They prefer to solve problems quickly using canned libraries and simple patterns. These students are often quite productive, but they sometimes soon hit a wall in their learning. When a student rides along the surface of what they are told in class, never digging deeper, they tend to have a shallow knowledge of how things work in their own programs. Again, this can lead to a high level of productivity, but it also produces brittle knowledge. When something changes, or the material gets more difficult, they begin to struggle. A few of the students eventually develop new habits and move nicely into the group of students who likes to grind. The ones who don't make the transition continue to struggle and begin to enjoy their courses less.

There is a rather wide variation among undergrad CS students, both in their goals and in their preferred styles or working and learning. This variation is one of the challenges facing profs who hope to reaching the full spectrum of students in their classes. And helping students to develop new attitudes toward learning and doing is always a challenge.


Posted by Eugene Wallingford | Permalink | Categories: Computing, Teaching and Learning

March 22, 2017 4:50 PM

Part of the Fun of Programming

As I got ready for class yesterday morning, I decided to refactor a piece of code. No big deal, right? It turned out to be a bigger deal than I expected. That's part of the fun of programming.

The function in question is a lexical addresser for a little language we use as a specimen in my Programming Languages course. My students had been working on a design, and it was time for us to build a solution as a group. Looking at my code from the previous semester, I thought that changing the order of two cases would make for a better story in class. The cases are independent, so I swapped them and ran my tests.

The change broke my code. It turns out that the old "else" clause had been serving as a convenient catch-all and was only working correctly due to an error in another function. Swapping the cases exposed the error.

Ordinarily, this wouldn't be a big deal, either. I would simply fix the code and give my students a correct solution. Unfortunately, I had less than an hour before class, so I now found myself in a scramble to find the bug, fix it, and make the changes to my lecture notes that had motivated the refactor in the first place. Making changes like this under time pressure is rarely a good idea... I was tempted to revert to the previous version, teach class, and make the change after class. But I am a programmer, dogged and often foolhardy, so I pressed on. With a few minutes to spare, I closed the editor on my lecture notes and synced the files to my teaching machine. I was tired and still had a little nervous energy coursing through me, but I felt great. That's part of the fun of programming.

I will say this: Boy, was I glad to have my test suite! It was incomplete, of course, because I found an error in my program. But the tests I did have helped me to know that my bug fix had not broken something else unexpectedly. The error I found led to several new tests that make the test suite stronger.

This experience was fresh in my mind this morning when I read "Physics Was Paradise", an interview with Melissa Franklin, a distinguished experimental particle physicist at Harvard. At one point, Franklin mentioned taking her first physics course in high school. The interviewer asked if physics immediately stood out as something she would dedicate her life to. Franklin responded:

Physics is interesting, but it didn't all of a sudden grab me because introductory physics doesn't automatically grab people. At that time, I was still interested in being a writer or a philosopher.

I took my first programming class in high school and, while I liked it very much, it did not cause me to change my longstanding intention to major in architecture. After starting in the architecture program, I began to sense that, while I liked architecture and had much to learn from it, computer science was where my future lay. Maybe somewhere deep in my mind was memory of an experience like the one I had yesterday, battling a piece of code and coming out with a sense of accomplishment and a desire to do battle again. I didn't feel the same way when working on problems in my architecture courses.

Intro CS, like intro physics, doesn't always snatch people away from their goals and dreams. But if you enjoy the fun of programming, eventually it sneaks up on you.


Posted by Eugene Wallingford | Permalink | Categories: Computing, Personal, Software Development

March 18, 2017 11:42 AM

Hidden Figures, Douglas Engelbart Edition

At one point in this SOHP interview, Douglas Engelbart describes his work at the Ames Research Center after graduating from college. He was an electrical engineer, building and maintaining wind tunnels, paging systems, and other special electronics. Looking to make a connection between this job and his future work, the interviewer asked, "Did they have big computers running the various operations?" Engelbart said:

I'll tell you what a computer was in those days. It was an underpaid woman sitting there with a hand calculator, and they'd have rooms full of them, that's how they got their computing done. So you'd say, "What's your job?" "I'm a computer."

Later in the interview, Engelbart talks about how his experience working with radar in the Navy contributed to his idea for a symbol-manipulating system that could help people deal with complexity and urgency. He viewed the numeric calculations done by the human computers at Ames as being something different. Still, I wonder how much this model of parallel computing contributed to his ideas, if only implcitly.


Posted by Eugene Wallingford | Permalink | Categories: Computing

March 17, 2017 9:27 AM

What It Must Feel Like to be Ivan Sutherland

In The Victorian Internet, Tom Standage, says this about the unexpected challenge facing William Cooke and Samuel Morse, the inventors of the telegraph:

[They] had done the impossible and constructed working telegraphs. Surely the world would fall at their feet. Building the prototypes, however, turned out to be the easy part. Convincing people of their significance was far more of a challenge.

That must be what it feels like to be Ivan Sutherland. Or Alan Kay, for that matter.


Posted by Eugene Wallingford | Permalink | Categories: Computing

March 16, 2017 8:50 AM

Studying Code Is More Like Natural Science Than Reading

A key passage from Peter Seibel's 2014 essay, Code Is Not Literature:

But then it hit me. Code is not literature and we are not readers. Rather, interesting pieces of code are specimens and we are naturalists. So instead of trying to pick out a piece of code and reading it and then discussing it like a bunch of Comp Lit. grad students, I think a better model is for one of us to play the role of a 19th century naturalist returning from a trip to some exotic island to present to the local scientific society a discussion of the crazy beetles they found: "Look at the antenna on this monster! They look incredibly ungainly but the male of the species can use these to kill small frogs in whose carcass the females lay their eggs."
The point of such a presentation is to take a piece of code that the presenter has understood deeply and for them to help the audience understand the core ideas by pointing them out amidst the layers of evolutionary detritus (a.k.a. kludges) that are also part of almost all code. One reasonable approach might be to show the real code and then to show a stripped down reimplementation of just the key bits, kind of like a biologist staining a specimen to make various features easier to discern.

My scientist friends often like to joke that CS isn't science, even as they admire the work that computer scientists and programmers do. I think Seibel's essay expresses nicely one way in which studying software really is like what natural scientists do. True, programs are created by people; they don't exist in the world as we find it. (At least programs in the sense of code written by humans to run on a computer.) But they are created under conditions that look a lot more like biological evolution than, say, civil engineering.

As Hal Abelson says in the essay, most real programs end up containing a lot of stuff just to make it work in the complex environments in which they operate. The extraneous stuff enables the program to connect to external APIs and plug into existing frameworks and function properly in various settings. But the extraneous stuff is not the core idea of the program.

When we study code, we have to slash our way through the brush to find this core. When dealing with complex programs, this is not easy. The evidence of adaptation and accretion obscures everything we see. Many people do what Seibel does when they approach a new, hairy piece of code: they refactor it, decoding the meaning of the program and re-coding it in a structure that communicates their understanding in terms that express how they understand it. Who knows; the original program may well have looked like this simple core once, before it evolved strange appendages in order to adapt to the condition in which it needed to live.

The folks who helped to build the software patterns community recognized this. They accepted that every big program "in the wild" is complex and full of cruft. But they also asserted that we can study such programs and identify the recurring structures that enable complex software both to function as intended and to be open to change and growth at the hands of programmers.

One of the holy grails of software engineering is to find a way to express the core of a system in a clear way, segregating the extraneous stuff into modules that capture the key roles that each piece of cruft plays. Alas, our programs usually end up more like the human body: a mass of kludges that intertwine to do some very cool stuff just well enough to succeed in a harsh world.

And so: when we read code, we really do need to bring the mindset and skills of a scientist to our task. It's not like reading People magazine.


Posted by Eugene Wallingford | Permalink | Categories: Computing, Patterns, Software Development

March 10, 2017 2:51 PM

Reading Is A Profoundly Creative Act

This comes from Laura Miller, a book reviewers and essayist for Slate, in a Poets & Writers interview:

I also believe that reading is a profoundly creative act, that every act of reading is a collaboration between author and reader. I don't understand why more people aren't interested in this alchemy. It's such an act of grace to give someone else ten or fifteen hours out of your own irreplaceable life, and allow their voice, thoughts, and imaginings into your head.

I think this is true of all reading, whether fiction or nonfiction, literary or technical. I often hear CS profs tell their students to read "actively" by trying code out in an interpreter, asking continually what the author means, and otherwise engaging with the material. Students who do have a chance to experience what Miller describes: turning over a few hours of their irreplaceable lives to someone who understands a topic well, allow their voice, thoughts, and imaginings into their heads, and coming out on the other end of the experience with new thoughts -- and maybe even a new mind.


Posted by Eugene Wallingford | Permalink | Categories: General, Teaching and Learning

March 09, 2017 3:20 PM

The Disappearing Millions

Almost a decade ago, I last blogged about my library book version of Scott Hastings's million: leading the league, so to speak, in being the first person to check a particular book out of my university library. Since my first post of the subject twelve years ago, I have apparently mellowed... I'm no longer willing to claim that I lead the league in this stat. Other patrons certainly read more books than I do, and if they keep their eyes open for new acquisitions, they almost surely top me. But even the humbler me can't help but notice that many of the books I check out, whether CS books or literature, seem to be in mint condition. They are being read for the first time, by me.

These days, identifying millions is a more fallible task. The library long ago terminated the practice of stamping a book's due date on a slip inside the front cover. That's all handled electronically now (those infernal computers!), so only the library knows when a book was last checked out. On the long list of cultural experiences lost to changing culture and advancing technology, this one is rather minor, but it's one that a frequent user of libraries might notice feel wistful about. I sometimes do. I always liked seeing the long list of due dates in the books I borrowed; it bestowed on me a sense of kinship with the readers who came before. In the case of all those Asimov and Vonnegut books I re-read, one of the readers who came before was me!

I do think I have another million to my credit, though. A couple of weeks ago, I went over to library to look for some book -- a novel or literary criticism, I can't remember. I looked it over and decided not to check it out after all. I was in no hurry to get back to the office, so I indulged in a few minutes of wandering the stacks to see if anything struck my fancy. I hadn't done that in a while, and I missed it.

I ended up holding Cycling, the 2003 second novel of Greg Garrett. It was purchased long enough ago to have a Due Date slipped glued inside the front cover, but the slip was empty. The cover, pages, and corners gave every appearance of being brand new. Seeing no evidence to the contrary, I stake my claim. When you consider changes in library acquisitions, changes in my reading habits, and the uncertainty today of knowing which books have never been read, how many more times will I have the chance?

"Cycling" was a pretty good read, too, for what that's worth. It was another serendipitous find while wandering the stacks.


Posted by Eugene Wallingford | Permalink | Categories: Personal

March 05, 2017 10:53 AM

"Flying by Instruments" and Learning a New Programming Style

Yesterday afternoon I listened to a story told by someone who had recently been a passenger in a small plane flown by a colleague. As they climbed to their cruising altitude, which was clear and beautiful, the plane passed through a couple thousand feet of heavy clouds. The pilot flew confidently, having both training and experience in instrument flight.

The passenger telling the story, however, was disoriented and a little scared by being in the clouds and not knowing where they were heading. The pilot kept him calm by explaining the process of "flying by instruments" and how he had learned it. Sometimes, learning something new can give us confidence. Other times, just listening to a story can distract us enough to get us through a period of fear.

This story reminded me of a session early in my programming languages course, when students are learning Racket and functional programming style. Racket is quite different from any other language they have learned. "Don't dip your toes in the water," I tell them. "Get wet."

For students who prefer their learning analogies not to involve potential drowning -- that is, after all, the sensation many of them report feeling as they learn to cope with all of Racket's parentheses for the first time -- I relate an Alan Kay story that talks about learning to fly an airplanes after already knowing how to drive a car. Imagine what the world be like if everyone refused to learn how to fly a plane because driving was so much more comfortable and didn't force them to bend their minds a bit? Sure, cars are great and serve us well, but planes completely change the world by bringing us all closer together.

I have lost track of where I had heard or read Kay telling that story, so when I wrote up the class notes, I went looking for a URL to cite. I never found one, but while searching I ran across a different use of airplanes in an analogy that I have since worked into my class. Here's the paragraph I use in my class notes, the paragraph I thought of while listening to the flying-by-instruments story yesterday:

The truth is that bicycles and motorcycles operate quite differently than wheeled vehicles that keep three or more wheels on the ground. For one thing, you steer by leaning, not with the handlebars or steering wheel. Learning to fly an airplane gives even stronger examples of having to learn that your instincts are wrong, and that you have to train yourself to "instinctively" know not only that you turn by banking rather than with the rudder, but that you control altitude primarily with the throttle, not the elevators, speed primarily with the elevators not the throttle, and so forth.

Learning to program in a new style, whether object-oriented, functional, or concatenative, usually requires us to overcome deeply-ingrained design instincts and to develop new instincts that feel uncomfortable while we are learning. Developing new instincts takes some getting used to, but it's worth the effort, even if we choose not to program much in the new style after we learn it.

Now I find myself thinking about what it means to "fly by instruments" when we program. Is our unit testing framework one of the instruments we come to rely on? What about a code smell detector such as Reek? If you have thoughts on this idea, or pointers to what others have already written, I would love to hear from you.

Postscript.   I originally found the passage quoted above in a long-ish article about Ruby and Smalltalk, but that link has been dead for a while. I see that the article was reposted in a Ruby Buzz Forum message called On Ceremony and Training Wheels.

Oh, and if you know where I can find the Alan Kay story I went looking for online, I will greatly appreciate any pointers you can offer!


Posted by Eugene Wallingford | Permalink | Categories: Software Development, Teaching and Learning