1. X := some task that people do well, but not computers.
2. "It would really be impressive if a computer could X."
3. Computer does X.
4. "That's not intelligent. The computer is only doing search (or number crunching, or ...)."
5. X := something else.
6. Go to 2.

A common variation of this pattern is to replace Step 3 with a different dodge:

"That's no big deal. X doesn't really require intelligence."

In either case, the target moves.

Occasionally, the critic must admit, if grudgingly, that the task requires intelligence, whatever that means, and that the computer performs it well. But there is still one last move available to deflect the achievement from the computer:

"This is a human achievement. People had to program the computer."

I suspect that until a computer learns everything it knows from scratch -- whatever that means -- this pattern will repeat. We humans have an image to protect.

~~~~

Postscript. I wrote this after reading a short interview interview with playwright Matt Charman, who has dramatized Deep Blue's epic 1997 match win over world chess champion Garry Kasparov. Note that Charman does not employ the dodges I list. He simply chose to focus on the human personalities involved in the drama. And those personalities are worthy of exploration, especially the fascinating Kasparov!

Hague's concern with currying is practical:

Don't get so swept up in that theory that you forget the obvious: in any programming language ever invented, there's already a way to easily define functions of multiple arguments. That you can build this up from more primitive features is not useful or impressive to non-theoreticians.

Of course, my context is a little different. We teach functional programming in a course on programming languages, so a little theory is important. We want students not only to be able to write code in a functional style but also to understand some of the ideas at the foundation of the languages they use. We also want them to understand a bit about how different programming styles relate to one another.

But even in the context of teaching people to think functionally and to write code in that style, I think it's okay to talk about currying. Indeed, it is essential. Currying is not simply a theoretical topic. It is a valuable programming technique.

Here is an example. When we write a language interpreter, we often write a procedure names eval-exp. It takes two arguments: an expression to evaluate, and a list of variable/value bindings.

   (define eval-exp
     (lambda (exp env)
       ...))

The binding list, sometimes called an environment, is a map of names declared in the local block to their values, along with the bindings from the blocks that contain the local block. Each time the interpreter enters a new block, it pushes a new set of name/value pairs onto the binding list and recurses.

To evaluate a function call for which arguments are passed by value, the interpreter must first evaluate all of the function's arguments. As the arguments are all in the same block, they are evaluated using the same binding list. We could write a new procedure to evaluate the arguments recursively, but this seems like a great time to map a procedure over a list: (map eval-exp args), get a list of the results, and pass them to the code that applies the function to them.

We can't do that, though, because eval-exp is a two-argument procedure, and map works only with a one-argument procedure. But the same binding list is used to evaluate each of the expressions, so that argument to eval-exp is effectively a constant for the purposes of the mapping operation.

So we curry eval-exp:

   (define eval-exp-with
     (lambda (bindings)
       (lambda (exp)
         (eval-exp exp bindings))))

... to create the one-argument evaluator that we need, and we use it to evaluate the arguments with map:

   ; in eval-exp
   (map (eval-exp-with env) arguments)

In most functional languages, we can use a nameless lambda to curry eval-exp "in place" and avoid writing an explicit helper function:

   ; an alternative approach in eval-exp
   (map (lambda (exp)
          (eval-exp exp bindings))
        arguments)

This doesn't look much like currying because we never created the procedure that takes the bindings argument. But we can reach this same piece of code by writing eval-exp-with, calling it in eval-exp, and then using program derivation to substitute the value of the call for the call itself. This is actually a nice connection to be able to make in a course about programming languages!

When I deliver short tutorials on functional style, currying often does not make the cut, because there are so many cool and useful ideas to cover. But it doesn't take long writing functional code before currying becomes useful. As this example shows, currying is a practical tool for the functional programmer to have in his or her pocket. In FP, currying isn't just theory. It's part of the style.

When people refer to "higher education" in this country, they are talking about two systems. One is élite. It's made up of selective schools that people can apply to -- schools like Harvard, and also like U.C. Santa Cruz, Northeastern, Penn State, and Kenyon. All these institutions turn most applicants away, and all pursue a common, if vague, notion of what universities are meant to strive for. When colleges appear in movies, they are verdant, tree-draped quadrangles set amid Georgian or Gothic (or Georgian-Gothic) buildings. When brochures from these schools arrive in the mail, they often look the same. Chances are, you'll find a Byronic young man reading "Cartesian Meditations" on a bench beneath an elm tree, or perhaps his romantic cousin, the New England boy of fall, a tousle-haired chap with a knapsack slung back on one shoulder. He is walking with a lovely, earnest young woman who apparently likes scarves, and probably Shelley. They are smiling. Everyone is smiling. The professors, who are wearing friendly, Rick Moranis-style glasses, smile, though they're hard at work at a large table with an eager student, sharing a splayed book and gesturing as if weighing two big, wholesome orbs of fruit. Universities are special places, we believe: gardens where chosen people escape their normal lives to cultivate the Life of the Mind.

I went to a less selective school than the ones mentioned here, but the vague ideal of higher education was the same. I recognized myself, vaguely, in the passage about the tousle-haired chap with a knapsack, though on a Midwestern campus. I certainly pined after a few lovely, earnest young women with a fondness for scarves and the Romantic poets in my day. These days, I have become the friendly, glasses-wearing, always-smiling prof in the recruiting photo.

The descriptions of movie scenes and brochures, scarves and Shelley and approachable professors, reminded me most of something my daughter told me as she waded through recruiting literature from so many schools a few years ago, "Every school is unique, dad, in exactly the same way." When the high school juniors see through the marketing facade of your pitch, you are in trouble.

That unique-in-the-same-way character of colleges and university pitches is a symptom of what lies at the heart of the coming "disruption" of what we all think of as higher education. The traditional ways for a school to distinguish itself from its peers, and even from schools it thinks of as lesser rivals, are becoming less effective. I originally wrote "disappearing", but they are now ubiquitous, as every school paints the same picture, stresses the same positive attributes, and tries not to talk too much about the negatives they and their peers face. Too many schools chasing too few tuition-paying customers accelerates the process.

Trying to protect the ideal of higher education is a noble effort now being conducted in the face of a rapidly changing landscape. However, the next sentence of the recent New Yorker article Laptop U, from which the passage quoted above comes, reminds us:

But that is not the kind of higher education most Americans know. ...

It is the other sort of higher education that will likely be the more important battleground on which the higher ed is disrupted by technology.

We are certainly beginning to have such conversations at my school, and we are starting to hear rumblings from outside. My college's dean and our new university president recently visited the Fortune 100 titan that dominates local industry. One of the executives there gave them several documents they've been reading there, including "Laptop U" and the IPPR report mentioned in it, "An Avalanche is Coming: Higher Education and the Revolution Ahead".

It's comforting to know your industry partners value you enough to want to help you survive a coming revolution. It's also hard to ignore the revolution when your partners begin to take for granted that it will happen.

When one beast dumps you, summon the guts to find another. If it tries to kill you, the party has definitely started. Otherwise, life is a slow retirement.

Rollins is talking about why he's not making music anymore, but his observation applies to other professions. We all know programmers who are riding out the long tail of an intellectual challenge that died long ago. College professors, too.

I have to imagine that this is a sad life. It certainly leaves a lot of promise unfulfilled.

If you think you have a handle on the beast, then the beast has probably moved on. Find a new beast with which to do battle.

Cue the Elvin Bishop [ video ]...

I smile whenever I see this kind of statement on a website's About page:

Erika Carlson was studying clinical psychology in 2011, when she wrote her first line of Python code. She fell in love with programming, decided to change paths, and is now a software developer at Pillar Technology.

I fell in love upon writing my first line of code, too.

Not everyone will have the same reaction Erika and I had, but it's good that we give people at least an opportunity to learn how to program. Knowing that someone might react this way focuses my mind on giving novice programmers a good enough experience that they can, if they are so inclined.

My teaching should never get in the way of true love.

    Installing ApplicationX

    1. Open the disk image
    2. Drag ApplicationX to your Applications folder
    3. Eject the disk image

The app loses points if I really have to drag it to the Applications folder. The Desktop should do.

I understand the value in ./configure and ./make and setting paths and... but it sure is nice when I don't have to use them.

I have homework. I need information from you.

The actual messages can be a lot more entertaining. Be sure to check out at least the opening of his piece, which reprises a multi-day exchange with a random high school student.

I'm not an accomplished popular science writer like Zimmer, but as a CS professor at a public university I receive occasional messages of the sort Zimmer describes from high school students across our region. I try to help out as best I can, and the volume is not so large that I get burnt out trying to guide the student to a more fruitful exchange than "Tell me something" followed by "Here is some information you could have read for yourself".

Fortunately, most of the messages of this sort that reach my inbox come from students in my own courses. Well, it's unfortunate that I receive these messages at all, because they are often a symptom of laziness and presumptuousness. Most often, though, they are simply a sign of bad habits learned in their previous years of schooling. The fortunate part is that I have a chance to help students learn new, better habits of intellectual discipline and discourse.

My approach is a lot like the one Zimmer relates in his exchange with young Davis, so much so that a former student of mine forwarded me a link to Zimmer's piece and said "The exchange at the beginning reminded me of you."

But as a classroom teacher, I have an opportunity that internet celebrities don't: I get to see the question-askers in the classroom two or three times a week and in office hours whenever students avail themselves of the resource. I can also ask students to come see me outside of class for longer conversations.

Talking face-to-face can help students know for certain that I really do care about their curiosity and learning, even as I choose consciously not to fulfill their request until they have something specific to ask. They have to invest something in the conversation, too, and demonstrate their investment by having more to say than simply, "I don't get it."

(Talking face-to-face also helps me have a better idea of when a student has done his or her work and yet still is struggling to the point of not knowing what to say other than "I don't get it." Sometimes, I need to go farther than halfway to help a student in real need of help.)

Most students are open to the idea that college is different from their past experience and that it's time for them to start taking more control of their learning. They learn new habits and are able to participate in meaningful exchanges about material with which they have already engaged.

A few continue to struggle, never moving far beyond "Give me information". I don't know whether their previous schooling has driven them into such a deep rut that they can't get out, or whether even with different schooling they would have been poorly suited for university study. Fortunately, these students are quite few among our student body. Most really do just need a gentle push in the right direction.

Michael Bernstein, in A Generation Ago, A Thoroughly Modern Sampling:

The AI Memos are an extremely fertile ground for modern research. While it's true that what this group of pioneers thought was impossible then may be possible now, it's even clearer that some things we think are impossible now have been possible all along.

When I was in grad school, we read a lot of new and recent research papers. But the most amazing, most educational, and most inspiring stuff I read was old. That's often true today as well.

Science.

Financial Agile tweets:

"If it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong". Classic.

... with a link to The Scientific Method with Feynman, which has a wonderful ten-minute video of the physicist explaining how science works. Among its important points is that guessing is huge part of science. It's just that scientists have a way of telling which guesses are right and which are wrong.

Teaching.

James Boyk, in Six Words:

Like others of superlative gifts, he seemed to think the less gifted could do as well as he, if only they knew a few powerful specifics that could readily be conveyed. Sometimes he was right!

"He" is Leonid Hambro, who played with Victor Borge and P. D. Q. Bach but was also well-known as a teacher and composer. Among my best teachers have been some extraordinarily gifted people. I'm thankful for the time they tried to convey their insights to the likes of me.

Art.

Amanda Palmer, in a conference talk:

We can only connect the dots that we collect.

Palmer uses this sentence to explain in part why all art is about the artist, but it means something more general, too. You can build, guess, and teach only with the raw materials that you assemble in your mind and your world. So collect lots of dots. In this more prosaic sense, Palmer's sentence applies to not only to art but also to engineering, science, and teaching.

... and to do code katas, too:

I find I'm more ready to discard pages than I used to be. I used to look for things to keep. I used to find ways to save a paragraph or a sentence, maybe by relocating it. Now I look for ways to discard things. If I discard a sentence I like, it's almost as satisfying as keeping a sentence I like. I don't think I've become ruthless or perverse--just a bit more willing to believe that nature will restore itself. The instinct to discard is finally a kind of faith. It tells me there's a better way to do this page even though the evidence is not accessible at the present time.

Says Don DeLillo, in The Art of Fiction No. 135. Even in programming, the willingness to cut a chunk of working code, or to rm -f a file, generally follows from a deep-seated belief that nature will restore itself. We are often happy to find that nature does a better job the second time around.

~~~

PHOTO: Adapted from http://www.flickr.com/photos/thousandrobots/5371974016/, (CC BY-SA 2.0).

After detailing the advantages of Arment's approach, Mod points out the primary disadvantage: you have to be able to write an iOS application. Which leads to this gem

The fact that Marco -- a programmer -- launched one of the most 'digitally indigenous' contemporary tablet publications is indicative of two things:

1. Programmers are today's magicians. In many industries this is obvious, but it's now becoming more obvious in publishing. Marco was able to make The Magazine happen quickly because he saw that Newsstand was underutilized and understood its capabilities. He knew this because he's a programmer. Newsstand wasn't announced at a publishing conference. It was announced at the WWDC.
2. The publishing ecosystem is now primed for complete disruption.

If you are a non-programmer with ideas, don't think I just need a programmer; instead think, I need a technical co-founder. A lot of people think of programming as Other, as a separate world from what they do. Entrepreneurs such as Arment, and armies of young kids writing video games and apps for their friends, know instead that it is a tool they can use to explore their interests.

Mod offers an a nice analogy from the design world to explain why entrenched industry leaders and even prospective entrepreneurs tend to fall into the trap of mimicking old technology in their new technologies: business skeuomorphism.

For example, designers "bring the mechanical camera shutter sound to digital cameras because it feels good" to users. In a similar way, a business can transfer a decision made under the constraints of one medium or market into a new medium or market in which the constraints no longer apply. Under new constraints, and with new opportunities, the decision is no longer a good one, let alone necessary or optimal.

As usual, I am thinking about how these ideas relate to the disruption of university education. In universities, as in the publishing industry, business skeuomorphism is rampant. What is the equivalent of the Honda N360 in education? Is it Udacity or Coursera? Enstitute? Or something simpler?