• “Context” determines how expressions evaluate, yet expressions  also determine context.

• A compelling way of deploying software is what supposedly originated with FLEX (Alan Kay). The program, the system and its data are all kept inside an image which can be persisted

• Lowering the Barriers to Programming: a survey of programming environments and languages for novice programmers

   

   

  http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~caitlin/papers/NoviceProgSurvey.pdf

   

  “Since the early 1960’s, researchers have built a number of programming languages and environments with the intention of making programming accessible to a larger number of people. This paper presents a taxonomy of languages and environments designed to make programming more accessible to novice programmers of all ages. The systems are organized by their primary goal, either to teach programming or to use programming to empower their users, and then by the authors’ approach to making learning to program easier for novice programmers. The paper explains all categories in the taxonomy, provides a brief description of the systems in each category, and suggests some avenues for future work in novice programming environments and languages.”

• If you see this page, chances are you have memory issues...

   

  We know what it feels like, so we decided to give our password resets for free!

• On the first day of the first course as a CS major, the prof said something like "in this course you'll learn how computers work from the bottom up", turned to the blackboard, and wrote Maxwell's equations. We laughed, and he said, "You're laughing because I got it wrong, no? You need quantum mechanics for transistors"
• "in this course you'll learn how computers work from the bottom up", turned to the blackboard, and wrote Maxwell's equations. We laughed, and he said, "You're laughing because I got it wrong, no? You need quantum mechanics for transistors".
• the joke was a great reminder that your floor is someone else's ceiling.

1 more annotation...

• "All intellectual property rights are just licenses granted by society because it was thought, rightly or wrongly, that society as a whole would benefit by granting them. But in any particular situation, we have to ask: are we really better off granting such license? What kind of act are we licensing a person to do?

   

• "go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script"

• John Cowan says:
  19 May 2014 8:51 PM

  This, of course, is exactly how effects were treated in the primordial CPS compiler Rabbit. The more it changes, the samer it gets.