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Archive for the ‘juvenilia’ Category

How I got into programming

Posted in juvenilia, staying in, tagged , , , , on 28/07/2013| Leave a Comment »

The other day someone asked me how I got into programming. This was an interview question. In retrospect it’s a surprise that no-one has asked me this before. The next time I have cause to interview a programmer, I’ll be sure to ask them the same thing.

My first degree involved a certain amount of programming, but it didn’t occur to me until quite late that I might have a knack for it. Other people on the course had computers of their own, and had been programming for years. I didn’t, and hadn’t.

Well, that’s not quite true. I’d had some encounters when younger, which I can illustrate with some photos I took yesterday at the newly opened Cambridge home of the Centre for Computing History.
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The Turing machine as an image of thought

Posted in juvenilia, theory, tagged , , , , , on 22/06/2013| Leave a Comment »

A long time ago, when I was an undergraduate, I studied a module about Artificial Intelligence and philosophy of mind. It covered Searle’s Chinese Room argument, the Turing test, traditional AI vs connectionism. That sort of thing.

I think the main consequence of this was a realisation that I preferred intellectual history to that kind of philosophy. The impression I got was that debates trying to sort out the relation between “the body” and “the mind” didn’t appear either to have achieved their aim or to have said much of interest along the way. Better to relate a course of events and a line of thought. But that’s by the by.

One of the ideas mentioned in this course was that “the mind” was a Turing machine. I thought I had a pretty good argument for saying it wasn’t, but I never had the opportunity to state it. Now, let me see: how did it go again?
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Scrappy and derivative or ahead of its time

Posted in juvenilia, tagged , , , , , , on 16/11/2012| Leave a Comment »

Kevin Simler’s recent posting on ethics and programming features one of my favourite Brian Kernighan quotes. (I won’t repeat it here, as you can read it there.) This reminded me of another favourite thing: the cover illustration to The Practice of Programming, which features a little dog pointing out the book’s trio of key concepts.
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An old interview

Posted in juvenilia, tagged , , on 24/10/2012| Leave a Comment »

An old interview
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