A Reformation in Thinking: a Journey into Computer Science
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
1 Corinthians 13:11, King James Version
In my 22nd year, after a vastly fruitless four-year foray into political science, I have decided to pursue a computer science degree at Indiana University. This entry is the first into a journal which will log my developing understanding of the field.
I doubt that I will ever be short of material for this series. I should also note that I feel the title I’ve chosen is at least a little bit pretentious. So if you think that, then we both agree. However, I’m not sure there’s a better title for it. I have been told that I am literally trying to reform the way I think. From the brief glimpse I’ve had of the field thus far, it’s going to be a long road, though it one that is ultimately traversable.
For this first entry, I want to set down what I believed computer science was, and then explain what I am beginning to understand about the field from my limited exposure to it.
We’ve had a computer in my house since I was about three years old. The first one we had was a x386 which ran MS Dos Shell. My interest in computers at this point was more or less angling files until I managed to open Bio Hazard or Duke Nukem so that I could make things explode.
When I was younger I was dimly aware that all of my favorite games (Commander Stryker, Wolfenstein 3D, Commander Keen) were written using programming languages. But as far as my seven-year-old mind reasoned, these languages were not entirely dissimilar to speaking Chinese or Hungarian. I held all as unrelated. After all, it made usage of the word language.
This is an idea that remained largely unchanged in my mind until recently. My idea of a computer science major before this year was essentially as follows:
You want to learn to program stuff? Oh yeah, man, you take a C++ class. Yeah, they’ll teach you C++. Then you can program in C++. But, oh, you want to learn Java? Well then you’d better take a java class so you can program in Java. Maybe take both, then you’ll know how to program in C++ and Java. Then you’ll be sitting pretty.
In the tenth grade, I took an HTML course over the summer at Ball State University. We talked about Java some. We talked about HTML some. Perhaps its because these things are incredibly distinct (HTML isn’t really a programming language, per se— you couldn’t just write scripts with HTML) that the idea of languages as being extremely distinct and important in specific ways persisted. At so at 16, I believed still that for each language, there was a specific purpose, and I still held all as unrelated.
This pretty much encapsulates my former view of the field. You just learn to program stuff. Maybe you take a game programming class, make yourself a pretty little Tetris. If you wanted to program business applications, you’d take a class to go and develop those. It was extremely categorized.
In the last two years, many of the people I met became very close friends, and many of them were computer scientists. More than once, I would ask questions like
I’m interested in programming. What language should I learn first?
Right now, I’m in the School of Informatics’ CSCI-211: Introduction into Computer Science. If someone asked me, I would tell them to learn Scheme, and it’s not just because that’s the only language I’m vaguely proficient in.
The first major revelation that I’ve had is that my previously held view is, well, wrong.
As of today, I’m beginning to think that being a good computer scientist and a good programmer is not about learning a lot of languages. You have to understand the tenets.
You have to understand lists and trees, and how to manipulate them. You have to understand recursion and the principles of solving problems with computers. With the understanding of the tenets of computational problem solving, comes the understand that languages become almost ancillary to good programming.
You must understand the problem you want your program to fix. You must understand how to solve it, and finally how to implement the solution. You’ll only learn one of those in a reference manual.
That’s all I’ve got for now. This’ll be a pretty sporadic series so the next post might be in a few days, weeks, or months.
So until then,
Exception in read: unexpected end-of-file reading list at line 96, char 1 of C:/Users/Patrick/Odete 1.3/a2.ss
the cracking of old knuckles, and then the letting go
i guess I really can only write in four in the morning.
—-
Deeply humid summer air is choking the cicadas, who, even in their prime, at the height of their sonic reveries, are silenced. It seeps into all open windows and treats every pore as if it were an oil derrick, extracting crude sweat by the barrel. But even the efficacious grip of Mother Earth’s suddenly hateful atmosphere on this hellishly muggy summer evening cannot abate high school junior Steven Banta’s vengeance on Jefferson county.
Mosquitoes flock in their hordes, legions resplendent, feasting to the point (and some past) of bursting. Police officer and local baseball coach Larry Armbrecht’s eyes scarcely blink even as a mosquito gorges itself with his blood and then explodes on his arm. His heart his racing and he cannot look away.
Nor can Kelly Sabe, a colleague of Steven Banta, one year his senior. This is also her class standing. Her eyes are glued directly in front of her. She is standing in Main Street. The sirens and Klaxons behind her, growing ever louder, cannot stir her to move her feet. The soles of her New Balance sneakers may as well have been melted to the street. She wonders briefly if this is what a deer in headlights feels like- unable and moreover unwilling to budge for anything. Not that it much matters- she is safe on the sidewalk across the street.
On the nearby hill, Mayor Jerome “Jerry” Schaffer folds his issue of the Madison Courrier and sets it down on his porch’s black wrought iron table. He stands. From this point he stands on a 500 foot hill which at one point divided North Madison from Madison proper. From here, he is a king. He can see all of downtown Madison splayed out before him, like a child playing Sim City with his finger on the “Tornado” button. But Jerome “Jerry” Schaffer will not click tonight. Something is already wrong. All the sirens in all of Southeastern Indiana seem to be convalescing in his backyard, even from as far as North Vernon and East Enterprise.
He will be busy tomorrow. He already knows this.
Seventh grader Taylor Elbert doesn’t understand the significance of what he is watching, but somehow he knows even now that this will be town lore. Someday, perhaps, if he is fortunate enough to have grandchildren, he will tell them about this. Later on he will recognize the tremendous import of this happening. He will also realize the great import of having white teeth when attempting enter a relationship that may eventually yield grandchildren, and will later spend his life savings on Crest stock in the hopes that manufacturer coupons will lavish him with enough 3D White Strips to reverse the years of Cheeto and Mountain Dew damage. Time is yet to tell this tale’s end.
On the muddy banks of the Ohio, from Milton Kentucky, Steven “Mountain Man Bonnie” Banta sits on a cooler. He stands briefly, only for the purpose of opening his seat to pull out a Coors Light that his older cousin had been kind enough to straw purchase for him. He sits back down and laughs. From across the river he can see the cupola of the Jefferson Courthouse exhaling dark black clouds of smoke into the sky. He is Gaius Verres.
the boats burned in the sicilian harbor the flames rose hundreds of feet into the air we stood on the shore watching them burn we stood on the shore, we heard the old songs.
All I can think of these days is home. The sun setting the Ohio on fire. The old bridge. Kentucky’s lush hills and the reverberations of explosions above idling barges on the 4th of July. Memories surface. Hot days, humid mornings on the fields, British men urging us to run. Freshly cut grass caking on cleats with the morning dew. Cheap lunches, dirty swimming pools. The incredible must of Video Trek and Madison Video, now a country music radio station. Sifting through ruins of decades gone by at Catholic bazaars. Highly over-salted popcorn from Woolihan’s lumber.
Home. Truth.
Through the fog of the intimacy of touch, she told me that nothing stays the same. My old home on the Ohio is aging. I could not love it more.
Huddled over aging machines in learning to type. Catholic sports teams. Fried chicken on Sunday morning post-Mass in a state park- this is the best view of the coal power plant, which, on warm days, would emit clouds of sulfur-scented air which would roll across the Country Club’s insurmountably hilly expanse.
Memories. Just that.
Lee’s Army Surplus is gone. Late nights spent on the hill by the state hospital overlooking Madison’s ephemeral glow would now be spent by a new biotechnology company. And most of all, the bite of cold winter air on a mid-November night as the sun takes a flamethrower to the skies above Madison High School. Yes, even this is different.
Somewhere, Dream Academy performs “Life in a Northern Town” on an old clock radio as Jessica looks into my eyes in the glow of light from an empty aquarium.
It is a Tuesday, late summer. It is raining and is unseasonably cold at sixty-five degrees fahrenheit. The clouds are turgid with precipitation and it comes down in droves. It blocks out the sun. Outside, it is dark. I am in Napoleon, Illinois, in an old diner named “Broad Acres Dining Room”. Marty Robbins is wailing the lyrics to “El Paso” by way of an old radio in the kitchen.
I am wet from running from my car to the diner. The diner isn’t much warmer than it is outside and the hard red vinyl covered seats in the booth in which I am sitting do nothing to draw the dampness from my clothes.
She sits across from me, gazing deeply into the menu. She chews her gum loudly and fiddles briefly with one of the brass corners of the plastic casing. She has applied makeup for our meeting. In cautiously regarding her face, so as not to be caught staring, I soon reach the conclusion that this is the first time she has applied it on her own.
I order a coffee, black and strong, a gesture I hope will make me appear mature to her. She orders a diet Coca-Cola and places her spent gum in a napkin. As the song in the kitchen switches to a Little River Band song, she looks up at me. Our eyes meet.
A solution of carmine in ammonium hydroxide and rosewater perfumed with rose oil has been applied to her cheekbones with a brush. I believe this to be an effort to accentuate her already prominent cheekbones, which now look as if they have sustained minor burns. Polyethylene terephthalate, talc, ethylhexyl palmitate, acrylates copolymer, zinc stearate, methylparaben, and propylparaben have been mixed and applied to her eyelids with a sponge. She looks as if she has been the recipient of a firm haymaker. On her mouth, pigments, emollients, oils and waxes have been painted across her lips. This is the only thing she has managed to apply in an enticing fashion.
As I sip the coffee served to me, she glances back down at the menu and traces some selections with her index finger. My tongue is instantly scalded. My eyes cannot stray from what she has done to her face.
I love this. It’s like a swan song for the summer. The violin is mean and it whines like a cicada who knows its time is up. I can see it, as July breathes its dying gasps and August rolls in, bringing the first tides of autumn. The popsicles are starting to melt. The sun, setting in the west, starts to make the evening a little bit redder. The late-harvested corn starts to taste a little sweeter. The sunlight’s starting to last a little shorter and the night has just a little more nip to it.
So for 51 weeks we put away the juiciest tomatoes, the fresh corn, the giant fans (the ones that have been going since the 70’s and which have a very distinctive and slightly dangerous-sounding buzz). The late summer festivals begin. Lights strung across small main streets, and the river all lit up with blues and sizzling pork.
The leaves are starting to turn brown, and I think I will leave it at that.
Mamihlapinatapai (sometimes spelled mamihlapinatapei) is a word from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego, listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as the “most succinct word”, and is considered one of the hardest words to translate.[1] It describes “a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start.”
I love Facebook. I really do. Sometimes I sit around and I think of all the time I would spend doing nothing if facebook wasn’t there, sucking my time into a vortex like a resurgent Pamela Anderson going after Tommy Lee’s junk if it were coated in cocaine and chocolate.
But mostly I just read what other people think. And I read it like I care.
And that is really bizarre, because I don’t. I do not care that Nancy Hughes is getting lunch with her besties. I do not care that you will be seeing your boyfriend in nineteen days six hours, and I really really really do not fucking care that my lunch lady from high school is having problems in bed. I just don’t, more than partially because I’m not doing anything in bed that I would have problems with in the first place.
I think that part of this is my fault for filling my friends list with a lot of really inane people but we’ll save that for another day.
Every once in a while, I’ll get something that catches my eye. Something sharp. A friend of mine, Chris, asked a question of his friends list.
“So, what music artist do you guys think could ‘define’ the music of the Aughts? Who is the most iconic? Kanye? Black-Eyed Peas? Coldplay? Radiohead?”
A lot of my friends said Radiohead. I can dig that. I am pretty accepting of Radiohead and even go out of my way to listen to them, sometimes. OK Computer, while not released in the first decade of the 21st century, may be one of my all-time favorite albums.
Coldplay, as explained more thoroughly by Chuck Klosterman in an essay in Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, is basically a shitty version of Radiohead. Maybe they can get points for popularity? The disparity between their quality and following and Radiohead’s quality and following are curiously pretty steep. Radiohead has sold 30 million albums worldwide to Coldplay’s 50. There is no questioning the quality. I do not need someone to tell me that the stars are indeed yellow (only some of them are) and I think that the only place this might be romantic is either in pre-school or some sort of hospital for the mildly retarded.
Regardless, the disparity exists and is fairly large. You could throw an enemy off that disparity and watch him tumble to his death. You could drive off it, if you were Thelma, Louise, or any combination of the two. I am sure Wile. E. fucking Coyote has many a time rode a malfunctioning Acme rocket off the disparity before making one of those terrific PAFF sounds that he makes when he hits the ground.
I’m pretty ambivalent towards the Black Eyed Peas. They drew a little ire for their song Let’s Get Retarded. I could disparage that but I’m not into intentionally being a hypocrite with a retard joke just two paragraphs up.
But Kanye. Kanye, Kanye, Kanye.
There’s a lot to be said about our good friend Kanye West. Very few can really doubt his influence. He has run the gambit from dealing exclusively in rap, to his unique brand of off-key singing, to the autotune fad that crept up in the last few years of the decade. And it’s not like he’s TERRIBLE at what he does. He’s actually pretty decent!
He is at least more musically and stylistically adept than this fellow.
Okay, yeah, that was reaching. But I had a $5 bet with a friend that I would work that into this essay.
Back on track.
Kanye is influential and competent. Overall, though, I think he’s not the choice for the most representative musician of the aughts. I think that belongs to Radiohead by a pretty sound margin.
Kanye, however, represents something much more important.
Kanye West is the voice of our generation.
Don’t stop reading. I am going somewhere with this, I swear.
Kanye West is the voice of our generation, not through his music, but through how he deals with his fortune and celebrity. He is not knowingly the voice of our generation. To the contrary, he is very much unwittingly the voice for our generation.
And he’s not the voice of the entire generation. He is the voice of our generation when it has croup, or strep. He is representative of the worst parts of Generation Y.
Let me explain. I am going to do my best to refrain from ad hominem here but is going to be difficult not to directly insult someone who drives this
I wish I was kidding. That’s really his car.
It’s not that he uses the internet and social media to communicate with his fans. While that’s a trademark Generation Y sort of thing, celebrities from other generations are keyed in on this, too. Richard Gere uses friendster regularly to keep in contact with all fourteen of his fans.
I’m typing so fucking hard I might break my fucking Mac book Air!!!!!!!!
I’m doing really poorly at this not using ad hominem thing, aren’t I? It’s so hard to do good and it feels so good to be bad.
“I’m doing pretty good as far as geniuses go… I’m like a machine. I’m a robot. You cannot offend a robot… I’m going down as a legend, whether or not you like me or not. I am the new Jim Morrison. I am the new Kurt Cobain… They feel like, yo, you know ‘he’s got a God complex, because he said if they wrote the Bible again that he would be in it’. Duh, yeah, I would be in it. I feel like I’m one of the more important people in pop culture right now… The Bible had 20, 30, 40, 50 characters in it. You don’t think that I would be one of the characters of today’s modern Bible? And people have their own forms of bibles now. It’s a new day and age…”
