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| [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Smith_(author) | Andrew Smith 1961 ]] may be a nice guy in person, but after 60 pages of snarky ranting about software and the people who write it, I gave up. I have other things to read. The non-programmer British journalist decides to learn Python, and goes to [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_Conference | Pycon ]], where he critiques most and finds a few to praise. What purpose does this serve? Life is short, and I can find more value in other, shorter, ''nicer'' books. |
British-born 1961 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Smith_(author) | Andrew Smith ]] [[ https://andrewsmithauthor.com/ | website ]] My first glance at this book was off-putting - I somehow got the idea that the author thought perjoratively about programmers and technologists. The book is actually a journalist making a deep and sincere dive into software, the communities of people who create and maintain it, and how they think about it. . [[ https://andrewsmithauthor.com/devil/notes/ ]] ---- .pXI Prologue, 2013 and [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin | Bitcoin ]] , [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto | pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto ]] .pXI [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Back | Adam Back ]] cryptographer, cyberpunk, [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash | Hashcash ]] .pXIII Bitcoin uses C++ .pXIV Bitcoin [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exegesis | exegesis: ]] Satoshi not C++ native, learned to code in 1980s, mixed US/British spellings .pXV Russian(s)? [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladislav_Surkov | Vladislav Surkov? ]] [[ https://web.archive.org/web/20200531053057/https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n20/peter-pomerantsev/putin-s-rasputin | Putin’s Rasputin ]][[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflexive_control | reflexive control ]] .pXVII [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demimonde | demimonde ]] [[ https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/deranged | deranging ]][[ https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/febrile | febrile ]] .pXXVIII TV shows [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_(TV_series) | Silicon Valley ]][[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Robot | Mr. Robot ]][[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Doll_(TV_series) | Russian Doll ]] [[ https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/10Xer | 10Xer ]] 5% women 3% black .pXXVIII Facebook [[ https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-how-facebook-contributed-to-genocide-in-myanmar-and-why-it-will-not-be-held-accountable/ | Myanmar genocide ]][[ https://www.npr.org/2021/10/23/1048746697/facebook-misinformation-india | India ]][[ https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/5/13/sri-lanka-facebook-apologises-for-role-in-2018-anti-muslim-riots | Sri Lanka ]] ---- p001 Ch.01 Revenge of the !SpaghettiOs ---- .p001 1700 to 9000 programming languages .p002 [[ https://www.freecodecamp.org/ | freeCodeCamp ]] 2014 [[ https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/author/quincy/ | Quincy Larson ]] .p002 trio of web languages: [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML | HTML ]] [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSS | CSS ]] [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript | JavaScript ]] .p003 shift-devil: dash that should have been underscore .p004 [[ https://www.freecodecamp.org/ | fCC freeCodeCamp ]] [[ https://www.w3schools.com/ | W3Schools ]] .p005 Pascal case [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camel_case | Camel case ]] .p005 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum | lorem ipsum ]] .p007 programming is never easy ... accept that feeling -- of being constantly wrong and not knowing .p008 ... exposes me as probably no smarter than an economist. .p0011 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Weinberg | Gerald Weinberg ]] [[ https://geraldmweinberg.com/Site/Programming_Psychology.html | The Psychology of Computer Programming ]] ---- p013 Ch.02 Holy Grail ---- .p014 [[ https://www.python.org/psf-landing/ | Python Software Foundation ]] [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guido_van_Rossum | Guido van Rossum ]] .p016 Bloomberg essay [[ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-paul-ford-what-is-code/ | What is code? ]] .p018 [[ https://ntoll.org/about/ | Nicholas Tollervey ]] Don't let anyone tell you code is not political .p018 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_of_Python | Zen of Python ]] .p019 There should be one - and preferably only one - obvious way to do it. Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch. .compare Larry Wall's [[ https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/TMTOWTDI#English | TIMTOWTDI ]] for [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl | Perl ]] ---- p021 Ch.03 !PyLadies and Code Freaks ---- .p021 Young travelmate Alex, maintains websites using the [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Django_(web_framework) | Django ]] web framework (like MoinMoin, coded in Python) .p022 Author's new home in Marin, where crimes are [[ https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/harsh_one%27s_mellow#:~:text=(transitive%2C%20slang)%20To%20spoil,mood%20or%20to%20annoy%20one. | harshing a mellow ]] without a license, and gluten smuggling .p022 [[ https://ecstaticdance.org/ | ecstatic dance group ]] ... [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensei | sensei ]] .[[ https://us.pycon.org/2019/ | Pycon in Cleveland ]] .p023 [[ http://www.hosho.io/ | Hosho! ]][[ https://zulip.com/ | Zulip!]] [[ https://www.tivix.com/ | Tivix!]] [[ https://www.vonage.com/communications-apis/ | Nexmo!]] .p025 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naomi_Ceder | Naomi Ceder ]] .p027 [[ https://www.recurse.com/ | Recurse center in Brooklyn ]], phrase "well actually" banned .p027 San Quentin [[ https://thelastmile.org/ | The Last Mile ]] .p028 [[ https://ehmatthes.com/ | Eric Matthes ]][[ https://catalog.wccls.org/polaris/search/title.aspx?ctx=1.1033.0.0.6&pos=3&cn=4160387 | Python Crash Course ]] .p028 [[ https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/bikeshedding | Bikeshedding ]] .p028 [[ https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/bikeshedding | bike shedding ]] [[ https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yak_shaving | yak shaving ]] .p030 [[ https://pyladies.com/ | PyLadies ]] .p036 [[ https://roguelynn.com/about/ | Lynn Root ]] painting charity-auctioned for $16, $32, $64 ... $512 ... $1410 !! ---- p038 Ch.04 Minutely Organized Particulars ---- .p038 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra | Edsger Dijkstra ]] [[ https://archive.org/details/selectedwritings0000dijk | Selected Writings on Computing ]] ---- p046 Ch.05 The Real Moriarty ---- .p059 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Boole | George Boole ]] [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Laws_of_Thought | The Laws of Thought ]] .p059 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland) | Great Hunger ]] 1845-1852 . homeless in the streets while academics and church elders dined luxuriously ---- .p066 Ch.06 The New Mind Readers ---- .p067 Post-Brexit Überschwemmung (flooding, presumably of coders from England to the continent) .p068 Anti-immigration riots in [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Chemnitz_protests | Chemnitz ]] 2018 .p068 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Google_data_breach | 2018 Google data breach ]] private data of 500,000 uw34w .p070 [[ https://www.tu-chemnitz.de/informatik/ST/people/professor.php | Dr. Janet Siegmund ]] learning coder brain scans .p070 programming education [[ https://stemeducationjournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40594-020-00222-7 | high drop out rate]] (50% is "astronomical?" Higher for Medicine, Engineering, Architecture, Law, and Accounting) .p072 [[ https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/author/37565521200 | André Brechmann ]] Combinatorial !NeuroImaging, Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology, Magdeburg .p073 Java -> Python [[ https://peitek.com/ | Norman Peitek ]] .p073 [[ https://arthotel-magdeburg.de/ | artHOTEL Magdeburg ]] .p075 axon transmission rate 50% ?? .p078 computer code comprehension activates brain areas for working memory, problem-solving, and language processing, left hemisphere for most right-handers . same areas for natural language and general analytical processing . no left hemisphere for mathematical thinking .p078 Dijkstra "An exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset for a competent programmer." .p079 "...some computer science students are hardly able to talk, to form whole sentences when they come to us/" .p079 "... you can't train them. All you can do is find them and let them loose" .p080 [[ https://dl.acm.org/profile/81498658492 | Scott Portnoff ]] [[ https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3152433 ]] .p081 "Homework ... was to memorize the assigned program ... to write it out perfectly." .p081 "... this is how we acquire language" .p082 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Weinberg | Gerald Weinberg ]] [[ https://search.worldcat.org/title/39640074 | The psychology of computer programming ]] an approach that works for one person may not work for another .p082 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Poldrack | Russell A. Poldrack ]] [[ https://search.worldcat.org/title/1028166610 | The New Mind Readers ]] Central 616.07548 P7629n 2018 ---- p084 Ch.07 Theories of Memory ---- .p085 [[ https://bletchleypark.org.uk/ | Bletchley Park ]] . "Auntie Flo is not so well" message summoned 200 code breakers, 10,000 by war's end, 75% women .p086 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_machine | Enigma ]] Turing [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombe | Bombe ]] .p087 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenz_cipher | Lorenz ]] cipher, Tunny, Tunafish, intercepts called "fish" .p087 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turingery | Turingery ]] .p088 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine | Turing machine ]] "universal computing machine" .p089 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann | John von Neumann ]] . OCD, drawers and light switches flips .p093 [[ https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dissemble | "dissembling"?? ]] movie [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Imitation_Game | The Imitation Game ]] .p093 not Turing's, but [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Newman | Max Newman's ]] design, nicknamed [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heath_Robinson_(codebreaking_machine) | Heath Robinson ]] .p093 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer | Colossus ]] [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Flowers | Tommy Flowers ]] 1500? 1800? vacuum tubes .p094 paper tape input, 5000 characters per second, programmed with a switchboard in front and a plugboard in back .p095 In 2009 [[ https://www.usfca.edu/news/distinguished-researcher-marries-math-art | Benjamin Wells ]] hypothesized a cluster of 10 Mk II machines would have been [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness | Turing complete ]] .p095 Confirmed that Hitler expected D-Day landings at Calais rather than Normandy, so Eisenhower launched D-Day the next day. Colossus shortened the war by years and countless lives. .p096 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_Veblen | Oswald Veblen ]] nephew of [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorstein_Veblen | Thorstein Veblen ]] .p096 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_table | Artillery range table ]] computation on [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC | ENIAC ]] at [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore_School_of_Electrical_Engineering | University of Pennsylvania Moore School of Electrical Engineering ]] .p096 Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer 17K vacuum tubes, thirty tons, Turing Complete .p096 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adele_Goldstine | Adele Goldstine ]] project administrator .p098 exemplar professional and mother, daughter Marina .p098 Programming took weeks, plugboard cabling and 4000 ten-position switches .p099 six programmers learned ENIAC using the schematics, and diagnosed troubles to individual vacuum tubes .p100 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Mauchly | John Mauchly ]], [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper | Grace Hopper ]] [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_Antonelli | Kay McNulty ]] .p100 subroutines. nesting, loops .p101 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_Holberton | Betty (Snyder) Holberton ]] .p101 ENIAC 1945 December modelling thermonuclear explosion, one month, one million punch cards .p101 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Ulam | Stan Ulam ]] .p102 [[ https://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/idocs/VonNeumann_EDVAC.pdf | First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC ]] .p104 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eckert%E2%80%93Mauchly_Computer_Corporation | Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation ]] .p105 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIVAC_I | UNIVAC ]] for United States Census Bureau in 1951 .p110 author's 32 GB laptop .p111 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Petzold | Charles Petzold ]][[ https://www.charlespetzold.com/ | website ]] [[ https://www.charlespetzold.com/books/ | Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software ]] Beaverton 004 PET 2023 .p112 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse | Konrad Zuse ]] .p113 [[ https://www.ganssle.com/bio.htm | Jack Ganssle ]] [[ https://www.ganssle.com/tem-back.htm | The Embedded Muse ]] .p113 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_C._Martin | Robert C. Martin born 1952 ]] 2016 The Future of Programming . two major hardware transformations since 1950s, no radical advances in software writing technology . p153 "What happened? ... first 1970 job 24 programmers 30-40yo half women, 1980 50 programmers 20-30yo, 3 women .p114 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Bigelow | Julian Bigelow ]] Theories of Memory (essay? where?), history of the IAS project .p115 von Neumann bottleneck, instructions and memory in time series are slower .p116 von Neumann, we are "creating a monster" .p117 German Navy Enigma 4th rotor in 1942, [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieppe_Raid | Dieppe raid ]] (overseen by [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Fleming | Ian Fleming ]]) ... attempt to capture codebook? .p118 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Sale | Tony Sale ]] [[ https://search.worldcat.org/title/476951850 | model Colossus ]] at [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_National_Museum_of_Computing | National Museum of Computing ]] .p119 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomba_(cryptography) | Polish bomba cryptologic bomb ]] ---- p126 Ch.08 Hilarity Ensues ---- .p126 Lecture by [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Baldwin_(philosopher) | Thomas Baldwin ]] about [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Paul_Sartre | Satre's ]][[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_and_Nothingness | Being and Nothingness ]] .p127 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo_Johnson | UK education minister Jo Johnson ]] UK university lectures "highly variable" .p127 daughter bored by !PowerPoint lectures, enjoyed "just spoke" lecture .p137 [[ https://extendedstudies.ucsd.edu/about-us/instructors/chen-diane-d | Diane Chen ]] [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Django_Girls | DjangoGirls ]] .p139 Android/Perl meeting unfriendly, Python nice . 1984 women 40% of CS degrees, 2015 5% of CS degrees .p140 80's 90's men respected woman's ability and experience, in 2013 felt threatened, excluded and failed women .p140 1969, [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper | Grace Hopper ]] was [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Information_Technology_Professionals | Data Processing Management Association ]] first "Man of the Year" .p143 [[ https://prabook.com/web/dallis_kay.perry/1698224 | Dallis Perry ]] William M. Cannon [[https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1142620.1142628 | A vocational interest scale for computer programmers 1966 ]] . coding competence, one striking characteristic:disinterest in people. .p147 Carnegie Mellon: men loved to hack, women motivated by purpose, involvement collapsed to 5% in 2015 .p148 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_Ideological_Echo_Chamber | 2017 Google memo from senior engineer James Damore ]] women ...evolved ... inferior at ... programming .p150 2017 !Github study: women's work accepted less often if gender revealed, more often if it isn't .p152 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlton_McIlwain | Charlton D. McIlwain ]] book [[ https://search.worldcat.org/title/1104918411 | Black Software ]] CMill 302.23089 MCILWAIN .p154 [[ https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobility/stanford-university#:~:text=Stanford%20University&text=The%20median%20family%20income%20of,but%20became%20a%20rich%20adult. | Stanford ]] 17% undergraduates from top 1%, 52% from top 10% (34% from bottom 80%) . more interesting: later in life, avg. income of poor student 74th percentile, rich student 79th percentile, showing regression to the mean. .p155 [[ https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobility/university-of-california-berkeley| UC Berkeley ]] 3.8% from top 1%, 38% from top 10% (46% from bottom 80%) . later in life, avg income of poor student 70th percentile, rich student 75th percentile, similar regression to the mean . book quotes "bottom 60% of students" ... not .p156 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah-Jayne_Blakemore | Prof. Sarah Jane Blakemore ]] [[ https://www.apa.org/ed/precollege/ptn/2018/09/teenage-brain | Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain ]] Bvtn 155.5 BLA .p157 [[ https://gizmodo.com/why-cant-this-soap-dispenser-identify-dark-skin-1797931773 | Racist Soap Dispenser ]] .p159 "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." Pablo Picasso - - "Oh yeah? Try debugging one.' Me ---- p159 Ch.09 Catch 32 ---- .p165 "if you can understand the tutorial ..." ??? !GitHub isn't a tutorial, it is fragments of projects .p165 [[ https://you.women2.com/ ]] .p165 [[ https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.13/process/code-of-conflict.html#:~:text=The%20Linux%20kernel%20development%20effort,resulting%20in%20critique%20and%20criticism. | Linux Code of Conflict ]] .p166 "The German government trusts !GitHub with the text of its federal laws" . [[ https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1h2e7mt/til_all_of_germanys_federal_laws_regulations_are/ | No, a hobby project from one member of the Bundestag (Stefan Wehrmeyer) which then got abandoned. ]] . here's the [[ https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/ | ''actual'' repository ]] .p166 ... almost never got hacked? No ... a "gigantic Asian country" makes unauthorized changes, others revert them .p166 [[ https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11 | Apollo 11 LEM assembly language source code ]] .p167 ESR activist of #!MeToo-bashing libertarian right. [[ https://www.reddit.com/r/Libertarian/comments/j9dxmu/how_do_libertarians_feel_about_metoo/ | reddit "libertarian" babble about !MeToo ]] . This sentence is ad hominem "slander" (well, ignorant impoliteness). ESR is well known. He also has cerebral palsy (like my sister) and will (rarely) "compensate" with "power talk" (like my sister). ESR is very much worth listening to the other 99.9% of the time. Eric's wife Cathy is a lawyer, and he respects her opinions and feelings. Andrew Smith should read "I Used to Like You Until... : How Binary Thinking Divides Us" by Kat Timpf, and other recent books about seeing others without divisive partisan prejudice. I will suggest the same book to ESR, mostly because Timpf "does Libertarian" with panache. .p169 [[ https://bl.libguides.com/reference-services/business-and-ip-centre | British Library Patents ]] .p169 [[ https://patents.google.com/patent/US3841328A/en | Airplane hijacking injector ]] 1972 .p169 [[ https://patents.google.com/patent/US2882858A/en | Sanitary appliance for birds ]] 1956 '''US, not GB in book''' .p175 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman | Richard Stallman ]] free software movement 1983 . rabbit hole tunnel to [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Minsky#Association_with_Jeffrey_Epstein | Jeffrey Epstein ]] and [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Minsky | Marvin Minsky ]] .p176 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Levy | Stephen Levy's ]] 2010 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Computer_Revolution | Hackers ]] 2010 RMS: "[[ https://afflictor.com/2010/05/07/excerpted-geek-power-steven-levy-revisits-tech-titans-hackers-idealists-wired-2010/ | I'm the last survivor of a dead culture and I don't really belong in the world anymore ... and in some ways I feel I ought to be dead." ]] .p179 [[ https://medium.com/@jayhanlon | Jay Hanlon ]] [[ https://stackoverflow.com/ | Stack Overflow ]] .p179 Facebook wind turbine for psychosis, Stack Overflow channels generosity ---- .p184 Ch.10 A Kind of Gentleness ---- .p185 [[ https://ntoll.org/about/ | Nicholas H. Tollervey ]] [[ https://codewith.mu/ | Mu code editor ]] .p187 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning | sealioning ]] time wasting attacks on projects and coders .p187 Walrus Operator := Python assignment operator as part of a larger expression ... inside if statement? .p187 [[ https://opensource.com/life/15/8/patricia-torvalds-interview | Patricia Torvalds ]] [[ https://postmeritocracy.org/ | Post-Meritocracy Manifesto ]] .p190 [[ https://thehackernews.com/ | Hacker News ]][[ https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/the-lonely-work-of-moderating-hacker-news | moderator ]] [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Wiener | Anna Wiener ]] [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_Valley_(memoir) | memoir ]] Beaverton 338.476 WIE . author note : The classic Lisp text is Daniel Friedman's "The Little Schemer". MIT Press 1996 .p192 "If these kids are so smart, why are they poor?" .p193 [[ https://www.businessinsider.com/embarrassing-and-damaging-zuckerberg-ims-confirmed-by-zuckerberg-the-new-yorker-2010-9?op=1 | embarassing Zuckerberg messages ]] They trust me, dumb fucks (in 2005, quoted 2010) .p193 curiousity ... needs a kind of gentleness .194 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Dibbell | Julian Dibbell ]] [[ https://search.worldcat.org/formats-editions/41020637 | My Tiny Life ]] .p197 author's neighbor Sagar builds stuff ... stop him and he turns back into a frog. .p198 as small child, took apart grandmother's vacuum cleaner, put it back together .p199 [[https://www.twinoaks.org/ | Twin Oaks Commune ]] rural central Virginia .p200 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajneeshpuram | Rajneeshpuram 1981 - 1985]] [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajneesh | Osho ]] .p203 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test-driven_development | Test Driven Development ]] [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_Beck | Kent Beck ]] .p204 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUnit | SUnit ]] [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_testing | unit testing framework ]] framework [[ https://wiki.c2.com/?SmalltalkUnit | Ward C notes ]] .p205 no functional code written until a true/false test exists .p205 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pytest | PyTest ]] unit testing framework .p205 [[ https://pyweek.org/ | PyWeek ]] .p210 death and taxes and doubtful dependencies .p210 [[ https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/investing/what-is-faang | FAANG Stocks ]] Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google ---- p213 Ch.11 The Gun on the Mantlepiece ---- .p213 Guido van Rossum retires as BDFL age 63, 2019 ??b1956?? .p222 [[ https://www.scholastic.com/content/dam/teachers/articles/migrated-files-in-body/shakespeare_insult_kit.pdf | Shakespeare Insult Kit ]] .p226 [[ https://durbin.ee/ | Ee Durbin ]] Ernest: Pac-Man rule, always leave room for another to join a hallway discussion .p226 !PyCon t-shirt sheerer than usual, don't burn bra .p229 San Quentin [[ https://thelastmile.org/ | The Last Mile ]] ---- p236 Ch.12 Code Rush ---- .p236 "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid" [[ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/04/06/fish-climb/ | incorrectly attributed to Albert Einstein ]] .p237 [[ https://openhub.net/accounts/scc | Wolf nee. Scott Collins ]] "programming in Python is like coming home to a puppy" .p239 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Rush | Code Rush ]] 2000 documentary .p239 book [[ https://search.worldcat.org/title/1042121694| Totally Wired: The Rise and Fall of Josh Harris and the Great Dotcom Swindle ]] .p240 Wolf age 14 fixing computers for local businesses $50/hr .p241 notes [[ https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/netrev.html | Freeing the Source: The Story of Mozilla ]] 1999 .p242 programmers expected to change jobs every two years .p244 [[ https://www.generalmagicthemovie.com/ ]] DVD? no nearby libraries .p244 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Rubin | Andy Rubin ]] founded [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system) | Android Inc ]] in 2003 .p245 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Wozniak | Steve Wozniak ]] said 2013 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobs_(film) | Jobs ]] movie was great but inaccurate,"debate" with director [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Sorkin | Aaron Sorkin ]] .p246 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic | General Magic ]][[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Hertzfeld | Andy Hertzfeld ]] title "Software Wizard" .p247 Harvards[[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Gardner | Howard Gardner ]] [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligences | multiple intelligences ]] [[ https://search.worldcat.org/title/9732290 | book ]] PSU BF431.G244 1983 .p248 Hertzfeld: Zuckerberg insincere, not willing to trade profit for better user experience .p249 Hertzfeld favorite language Python .p250 Guido bio, p251 probably autism spectrum .p251 "master slave" language war, traces to electrical engineering 1904, some suggest controller/responder (how about lead and follow for flipflops) .p254 [[ http://www.wall.org/~larry/ | Larry Wall ]] .p255 TIMTOWTDINDVINBYE Tim Toady Bicarbonate: There Is More Than One Way To Do It But Sometimes Consistency Is Not A Bad Thing Either .p255 about American football "any sport requiring so much padding has yet to arrive at an appropriate set of rules" .p256 Wall studied music, chemistry, pre-med, joined NASA. evangelical Church of the Nazarene, accepts evolution .p257 modernism has simply replaced well-defined old rules with opaque new ones. Modernism is disruptive and inhumane .p258 Perl's priority ... individual freedom. Javascript same .p259 ramble about Modernism/Postmodernism .p260 after Programming Perl book, Perl 6 became an art project .p260 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Spencer | Henry Spencer ]] likened Perl to a "Swiss Army chainsaw". Smith's note points to jargon file at catb.org .p261 [[ https://scuttlebutt.nz/ | Scuttlebutt decentralized social network ]] .p263 Guido "... using computers for social interaction to the extend that we are now? It never occured to me." .p263 trio: gift for coding, also connected, empathetic, curious, fully rounded, exude gentleness .p264 code savant stereotype ... bad, potentially dangerous coder. ---- p265 Ch.13 Enter the Frankenalgorithm ---- .p265 2018 March 18, self-driving Volvo prototype (driver playing with phone) fails to recognize cyclist with shopping bags, [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg | Elaine Herzberg 49 yo ]] struck and killed .p266 2018 October 28, [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_Air_Flight_610 | Lion Air Flight 610 737 Max 8 ]]stalls and crashes in Java Sea. . New [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneuvering_Characteristics_Augmentation_System | Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System ]] added to kludge behavior of re-engined aircraft to mimic prior version so certification and pilot retraining could be avoided. Instead, software and pilots failed, killing 181 passengers and 8 crew. . Boeing "teabagged" the bottom line .[[ https://www.oed.com/dictionary/teabag_v?tl=true | "teabag" ]] refers to a variation of fellatio, what the fuck (obscene phrase matching obscene verb) was author Smith thinking? In a library book sold to public libraries used by children, no less. Ah well, perhaps the kids already "teabag" and I'm behind the times. .p268 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapons_of_Math_Destruction | Weapons of Math Destruction ]] 2016 by [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathy_O'Neil | Cathy O'Neil ]] 1972 [[ https://mathbabe.org ]] WCCLS Tigard, not Beaverton .p268 [[ | Virginia Eubank ]] [[ | Automating Inequality ]] .p268 [[ | Safiya Nobel ]] [[ | Algorithms of Oppression ]] [[ | ]] [[ | ]] [[ | ]] [[ | ]] [[ | ]] [[ | ]] [[ | ]] [[ | ]] ---- p287 Ch.14 ''Algorave?'' ---- [[ | ]] [[ | ]] [[ | ]] [[ | ]] ---- p300 Ch.15 A Codemy of Errors ---- [[ | ]] [[ | ]] [[ | ]] [[ | ]] ---- p320 Ch.16 Do Algos Dream of Numeric Sheep?: An AI Suite ---- [[ | ]] [[ | ]] [[ | ]] [[ | ]] ---- .p375 Ch.17 ''Apologies to Richard Feynman'' ---- [[ | ]] [[ | ]] [[ | ]] [[ | ]] ---- p392 Ch.18 A Cloud Lifts ---- [[ | ]] [[ | ]] [[ | ]] [[ | ]] ---- p405 Ch.19 Strange Loops and Abstractions: The Devil in the Stack ---- [[ | ]] [[ | ]] [[ | ]] [[ | ]] p421 Select Bibliography [[ http://andrewsmithauthor.com/devil/notes | Notes and Sources ]] |
The Devil in the Stack
Andrew Smith . August 2024 . Beaverton Lib. 005.1 SMI
British-born 1961 Andrew Smith website
My first glance at this book was off-putting - I somehow got the idea that the author thought perjoratively about programmers and technologists. The book is actually a journalist making a deep and sincere dive into software, the communities of people who create and maintain it, and how they think about it.
pXI Prologue, 2013 and Bitcoin , pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto
- pXIII Bitcoin uses C++
pXIV Bitcoin exegesis: Satoshi not C++ native, learned to code in 1980s, mixed US/British spellings
pXV Russian(s)? Vladislav Surkov? Putin’s Rasputinreflexive control
pXXVIII TV shows Silicon ValleyMr. RobotRussian Doll 10Xer 5% women 3% black
pXXVIII Facebook Myanmar genocideIndiaSri Lanka
p001 Ch.01 Revenge of the SpaghettiOs
- p001 1700 to 9000 programming languages
p002 freeCodeCamp 2014 Quincy Larson
p002 trio of web languages: HTML CSS JavaScript
- p003 shift-devil: dash that should have been underscore
p005 Pascal case Camel case
p005 lorem ipsum
- p007 programming is never easy ... accept that feeling -- of being constantly wrong and not knowing
- p008 ... exposes me as probably no smarter than an economist.
p0011 Gerald Weinberg The Psychology of Computer Programming
p013 Ch.02 Holy Grail
p016 Bloomberg essay What is code?
p018 Nicholas Tollervey Don't let anyone tell you code is not political
p018 Zen of Python
- p019 There should be one - and preferably only one - obvious way to do it. Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
p021 Ch.03 PyLadies and Code Freaks
p021 Young travelmate Alex, maintains websites using the Django web framework (like MoinMoin, coded in Python)
p022 Author's new home in Marin, where crimes are harshing a mellow without a license, and gluten smuggling
p022 ecstatic dance group ... sensei
p025 Naomi Ceder
p027 Recurse center in Brooklyn, phrase "well actually" banned
p027 San Quentin The Last Mile
p028 Bikeshedding
p028 bike shedding yak shaving
p030 PyLadies
p036 Lynn Root painting charity-auctioned for $16, $32, $64 ... $512 ... $1410 !!
p038 Ch.04 Minutely Organized Particulars
p046 Ch.05 The Real Moriarty
p059 Great Hunger 1845-1852
- homeless in the streets while academics and church elders dined luxuriously
.p066 Ch.06 The New Mind Readers
- p067 Post-Brexit Überschwemmung (flooding, presumably of coders from England to the continent)
p068 Anti-immigration riots in Chemnitz 2018
p068 2018 Google data breach private data of 500,000 uw34w
p070 Dr. Janet Siegmund learning coder brain scans
p070 programming education high drop out rate (50% is "astronomical?" Higher for Medicine, Engineering, Architecture, Law, and Accounting)
p072 André Brechmann Combinatorial NeuroImaging, Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology, Magdeburg
p073 Java -> Python Norman Peitek
p073 artHOTEL Magdeburg
- p075 axon transmission rate 50% ??
- p078 computer code comprehension activates brain areas for working memory, problem-solving, and language processing, left hemisphere for most right-handers
- same areas for natural language and general analytical processing
- no left hemisphere for mathematical thinking
- p078 Dijkstra "An exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset for a competent programmer."
- p079 "...some computer science students are hardly able to talk, to form whole sentences when they come to us/"
- p079 "... you can't train them. All you can do is find them and let them loose"
- p081 "Homework ... was to memorize the assigned program ... to write it out perfectly."
- p081 "... this is how we acquire language"
p082 Gerald Weinberg The psychology of computer programming an approach that works for one person may not work for another
p082 Russell A. Poldrack The New Mind Readers Central 616.07548 P7629n 2018
p084 Ch.07 Theories of Memory
p085 Bletchley Park
- "Auntie Flo is not so well" message summoned 200 code breakers, 10,000 by war's end, 75% women
p087 Lorenz cipher, Tunny, Tunafish, intercepts called "fish"
p087 Turingery
p088 Turing machine "universal computing machine"
p089 John von Neumann
- OCD, drawers and light switches flips
p093 "dissembling"?? movie The Imitation Game
p093 not Turing's, but Max Newman's design, nicknamed Heath Robinson
p093 Colossus Tommy Flowers 1500? 1800? vacuum tubes
- p094 paper tape input, 5000 characters per second, programmed with a switchboard in front and a plugboard in back
p095 In 2009 Benjamin Wells hypothesized a cluster of 10 Mk II machines would have been Turing complete
- p095 Confirmed that Hitler expected D-Day landings at Calais rather than Normandy, so Eisenhower launched D-Day the next day. Colossus shortened the war by years and countless lives.
p096 Oswald Veblen nephew of Thorstein Veblen
p096 Artillery range table computation on ENIAC at University of Pennsylvania Moore School of Electrical Engineering
- p096 Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer 17K vacuum tubes, thirty tons, Turing Complete
p096 Adele Goldstine project administrator
- p098 exemplar professional and mother, daughter Marina
- p098 Programming took weeks, plugboard cabling and 4000 ten-position switches
- p099 six programmers learned ENIAC using the schematics, and diagnosed troubles to individual vacuum tubes
- p100 subroutines. nesting, loops
- p101 ENIAC 1945 December modelling thermonuclear explosion, one month, one million punch cards
p101 Stan Ulam
p105 UNIVAC for United States Census Bureau in 1951
- p110 author's 32 GB laptop
p111 Charles Petzoldwebsite Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software Beaverton 004 PET 2023
p112 Konrad Zuse
p113 Robert C. Martin born 1952 2016 The Future of Programming
- two major hardware transformations since 1950s, no radical advances in software writing technology
- p153 "What happened? ... first 1970 job 24 programmers 30-40yo half women, 1980 50 programmers 20-30yo, 3 women
p114 Julian Bigelow Theories of Memory (essay? where?), history of the IAS project
- p115 von Neumann bottleneck, instructions and memory in time series are slower
- p116 von Neumann, we are "creating a monster"
p117 German Navy Enigma 4th rotor in 1942, Dieppe raid (overseen by Ian Fleming) ... attempt to capture codebook?
p118 Tony Sale model Colossus at National Museum of Computing
p126 Ch.08 Hilarity Ensues
p126 Lecture by Thomas Baldwin about Satre'sBeing and Nothingness
p127 UK education minister Jo Johnson UK university lectures "highly variable"
p127 daughter bored by PowerPoint lectures, enjoyed "just spoke" lecture
p137 Diane Chen DjangoGirls
- p139 Android/Perl meeting unfriendly, Python nice . 1984 women 40% of CS degrees, 2015 5% of CS degrees
- p140 80's 90's men respected woman's ability and experience, in 2013 felt threatened, excluded and failed women
p140 1969, Grace Hopper was Data Processing Management Association first "Man of the Year"
p143 Dallis Perry William M. Cannon A vocational interest scale for computer programmers 1966
- coding competence, one striking characteristic:disinterest in people.
- p147 Carnegie Mellon: men loved to hack, women motivated by purpose, involvement collapsed to 5% in 2015
p148 2017 Google memo from senior engineer James Damore women ...evolved ... inferior at ... programming
- p150 2017 !Github study: women's work accepted less often if gender revealed, more often if it isn't
p152 Charlton D. McIlwain book Black Software CMill 302.23089 MCILWAIN
p154 Stanford 17% undergraduates from top 1%, 52% from top 10% (34% from bottom 80%)
- more interesting: later in life, avg. income of poor student 74th percentile, rich student 79th percentile, showing regression to the mean.
p155 UC Berkeley 3.8% from top 1%, 38% from top 10% (46% from bottom 80%)
- later in life, avg income of poor student 70th percentile, rich student 75th percentile, similar regression to the mean
- book quotes "bottom 60% of students" ... not
p156 Prof. Sarah Jane Blakemore Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain Bvtn 155.5 BLA
- p159 "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." Pablo Picasso - - "Oh yeah? Try debugging one.' Me
p159 Ch.09 Catch 32
p165 "if you can understand the tutorial ..." ??? GitHub isn't a tutorial, it is fragments of projects
p166 "The German government trusts GitHub with the text of its federal laws"
- p166 ... almost never got hacked? No ... a "gigantic Asian country" makes unauthorized changes, others revert them
p167 ESR activist of #MeToo-bashing libertarian right. reddit "libertarian" babble about !MeToo
- This sentence is ad hominem "slander" (well, ignorant impoliteness). ESR is well known. He also has cerebral palsy (like my sister) and will (rarely) "compensate" with "power talk" (like my sister). ESR is very much worth listening to the other 99.9% of the time. Eric's wife Cathy is a lawyer, and he respects her opinions and feelings. Andrew Smith should read "I Used to Like You Until... : How Binary Thinking Divides Us" by Kat Timpf, and other recent books about seeing others without divisive partisan prejudice. I will suggest the same book to ESR, mostly because Timpf "does Libertarian" with panache.
p169 Airplane hijacking injector 1972
p169 Sanitary appliance for birds 1956 US, not GB in book
p175 Richard Stallman free software movement 1983
rabbit hole tunnel to Jeffrey Epstein and Marvin Minsky
p176 Stephen Levy's 2010 Hackers 2010 RMS: "I'm the last survivor of a dead culture and I don't really belong in the world anymore ... and in some ways I feel I ought to be dead."
p179 Jay Hanlon Stack Overflow
- p179 Facebook wind turbine for psychosis, Stack Overflow channels generosity
- p184 Ch.10 A Kind of Gentleness
p187 sealioning time wasting attacks on projects and coders
- p187 Walrus Operator := Python assignment operator as part of a larger expression ... inside if statement?
p190 Hacker Newsmoderator Anna Wiener memoir Beaverton 338.476 WIE
- author note : The classic Lisp text is Daniel Friedman's "The Little Schemer". MIT Press 1996
- p192 "If these kids are so smart, why are they poor?"
p193 embarassing Zuckerberg messages They trust me, dumb fucks (in 2005, quoted 2010)
- p193 curiousity ... needs a kind of gentleness
- p197 author's neighbor Sagar builds stuff ... stop him and he turns back into a frog.
- p198 as small child, took apart grandmother's vacuum cleaner, put it back together
p199 Twin Oaks Commune rural central Virginia
p204 SUnit unit testing framework framework Ward C notes
- p205 no functional code written until a true/false test exists
p205 PyTest unit testing framework
p205 PyWeek
- p210 death and taxes and doubtful dependencies
p210 FAANG Stocks Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google
p213 Ch.11 The Gun on the Mantlepiece
- p213 Guido van Rossum retires as BDFL age 63, 2019 ??b1956??
p226 Ee Durbin Ernest: Pac-Man rule, always leave room for another to join a hallway discussion
p226 PyCon t-shirt sheerer than usual, don't burn bra
p229 San Quentin The Last Mile
p236 Ch.12 Code Rush
p236 "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid" incorrectly attributed to Albert Einstein
p237 Wolf nee. Scott Collins "programming in Python is like coming home to a puppy"
p239 Code Rush 2000 documentary
p239 book Totally Wired: The Rise and Fall of Josh Harris and the Great Dotcom Swindle
- p240 Wolf age 14 fixing computers for local businesses $50/hr
p241 notes Freeing the Source: The Story of Mozilla 1999
- p242 programmers expected to change jobs every two years
p244 https://www.generalmagicthemovie.com/ DVD? no nearby libraries
p244 Andy Rubin founded Android Inc in 2003
p245 Steve Wozniak said 2013 Jobs movie was great but inaccurate,"debate" with director Aaron Sorkin
p246 General MagicAndy Hertzfeld title "Software Wizard"
p247 HarvardsHoward Gardner multiple intelligences book PSU BF431.G244 1983
- p248 Hertzfeld: Zuckerberg insincere, not willing to trade profit for better user experience
- p249 Hertzfeld favorite language Python
- p250 Guido bio, p251 probably autism spectrum
- p251 "master slave" language war, traces to electrical engineering 1904, some suggest controller/responder
- (how about lead and follow for flipflops)
p254 Larry Wall
- p255 TIMTOWTDINDVINBYE Tim Toady Bicarbonate: There Is More Than One Way To Do It But Sometimes Consistency Is Not A Bad Thing Either
- p255 about American football "any sport requiring so much padding has yet to arrive at an appropriate set of rules"
- p256 Wall studied music, chemistry, pre-med, joined NASA. evangelical Church of the Nazarene, accepts evolution
- p257 modernism has simply replaced well-defined old rules with opaque new ones. Modernism is disruptive and inhumane
- p258 Perl's priority ... individual freedom. Javascript same
- p259 ramble about Modernism/Postmodernism
- p260 after Programming Perl book, Perl 6 became an art project
p260 Henry Spencer likened Perl to a "Swiss Army chainsaw". Smith's note points to jargon file at catb.org
- p263 Guido "... using computers for social interaction to the extend that we are now? It never occured to me."
- p263 trio: gift for coding, also connected, empathetic, curious, fully rounded, exude gentleness
- p264 code savant stereotype ... bad, potentially dangerous coder.
p265 Ch.13 Enter the Frankenalgorithm
p265 2018 March 18, self-driving Volvo prototype (driver playing with phone) fails to recognize cyclist with shopping bags, Elaine Herzberg 49 yo struck and killed
p266 2018 October 28, Lion Air Flight 610 737 Max 8stalls and crashes in Java Sea.
New Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System added to kludge behavior of re-engined aircraft to mimic prior version so certification and pilot retraining could be avoided. Instead, software and pilots failed, killing 181 passengers and 8 crew.
- Boeing "teabagged" the bottom line
"teabag" refers to a variation of fellatio, what the fuck (obscene phrase matching obscene verb) was author Smith thinking? In a library book sold to public libraries used by children, no less. Ah well, perhaps the kids already "teabag" and I'm behind the times.
p268 Weapons of Math Destruction 2016 by Cathy O'Neil 1972 https://mathbabe.org WCCLS Tigard, not Beaverton
p287 Ch.14 Algorave?
p300 Ch.15 A Codemy of Errors
p320 Ch.16 Do Algos Dream of Numeric Sheep?: An AI Suite
.p375 Ch.17 Apologies to Richard Feynman
p392 Ch.18 A Cloud Lifts
p405 Ch.19 Strange Loops and Abstractions: The Devil in the Stack
p421 Select Bibliography