Diff for "DevilStack"

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

• pXI Adam Back cryptographer, cyberpunk, Hashcash

• 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

• pXVII demimonde derangingfebrile

• 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

• p004 fCC freeCodeCamp W3Schools

• 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

• p014 Python Software Foundation Guido van Rossum

• 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.

  • compare Larry Wall's TIMTOWTDI for Perl

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

• Pycon in Cleveland

• p023 Hosho!Zulip! Tivix! Nexmo!

• p025 Naomi Ceder

• p027 Recurse center in Brooklyn, phrase "well actually" banned

• p027 San Quentin The Last Mile

• p028 Eric MatthesPython Crash Course

• 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

• p038 Edsger Dijkstra Selected Writings on Computing

p046 Ch.05 The Real Moriarty

• p059 George Boole The Laws of Thought

• 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"

• p080 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 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

• p086 Enigma Turing Bombe

• 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 John Mauchly, Grace Hopper Kay McNulty

• p100 subroutines. nesting, loops

• p101 Betty (Snyder) Holberton

• p101 ENIAC 1945 December modelling thermonuclear explosion, one month, one million punch cards

• p101 Stan Ulam

• p102 First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC

• p104 Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation

• 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 Jack Ganssle The Embedded Muse

• 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

• p119 Polish bomba cryptologic bomb

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

• p157 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
• p1

p159 Ch.10 A New Kind of Gentleness

p213 Ch.11 The Gun on the Mantlepiece

p236 Ch.12 Code Rush

p265 Ch.13 Enter the Frankenalgorithm

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

Notes and Sources