I jotted down some thoughts in preparation for the first weekly chat, which I then proceeded to miss. It looks like it went pretty well, more thoughts later. Here, for posterity, are my thoughts at the end of week 1.
0) It might be helpful to read the 'Opening Question' pattern in the Knowledge Hydrant draft, at http://www.industriallogic.com/papers/khdraft.pdf
Here's the advice, excerpted from the pattern:
'Begin dialogues with an opening question or series of questions that penetrate into the heart of a reading, puzzling and/or challenging participants, and leading a group to seach for a work's most profound ideas. Let people volunteer to ask the opening question, and encourage them to record their questions to improve them overtime.'
1) What did you think of the idea that computer science isn't science or about computers? They used the phrase 'procedural epistemology', epistemology being 'The branch of philosophy that studies the nature of knowledge, its presuppositions and foundations, and its extent and validity.' (dictionary.com) Do you think of programming as a 'novel formal medium for expressing ideas about methodology'?
2) I'm thinking that the real due 'date' for the week's assignment is the start of the weekly chat. This is presuming that we'll discuss the assignment and solutions during the chat, and that this will serve as our grading/feedback mechanism. This may be assuming too much... but it's worth a chat.
3) Pascal's Triangle, the golden ratio... there's more math here than I usually run in to, and perhaps it's the same for you. My take on this is to try what we can, find pointers to fill in the gaps in our education and skills, and press on through it... but I was curious to see what everyone's mood was about this.
4) I had to go back and think over the differences between applicative and normal order evaluation, and write out for myself the sentence 'Instead, it would first substitute operand expressions for parameters until it obtained an expression involving only primitive operators, and would then perform the evaluation.' (page 16). Did anyone else wrestle with this? Can you create an example of an expression that evaluates differently based on the method used?
5) The preface described the programmer seeking 'perfection in part and adequacy of collection'. it got me thinking about the typical parts I use when writing code - variable, function, loop, array, etc... and it got me thinking that I'm still writing Fortran, even though I work mostly in OO or OO-based langauges and have for some time. It made me think about the language I use when coding, and wondering if I can make it richer. So, what collection will suit? And what's perfect?
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