"To explain what I was doing in logic-driven software architecture I looked for a good metaphor and, on the spot, proposed that there was a kind of “contract” between caller and callee. He did not say anything, but his mere presence had enabled me to make my incipient ideas jell."
I hadn't realised that Hoare was present when Meyer first used the term 'contract' to describe his ideas.
"Around Easter 1961, a course on ALGOL 60 was offered in Brighton, England, with Peter Naur, Edsger W. Dijkstra, and Peter Landin as tutors. I attended this course with my colleague in the language project, Jill Pym, our divisional Technical Manager, Roger Cook, and our Sales Manager, Paul King. It was there that I first learned about recursive procedures and saw how to program the sorting method which I had earlier found such difficulty in explaining. It was there that I wrote the procedure, immodestly named Quicksort, on which my career as a computer scientist is founded. Due credit must be paid to the genius of the designers of ALGOL 60 who included recursion in their language and enabled me to describe my invention so elegantly to the world. I have regarded it as the highest goal of programming language design to enable good ideas to be elegantly expressed."
- C.A.R Hoare, The Emperor's Old Clothes, Comm. ACM 24(2), 75-83 (February 1981).
I retired in 2024 after a four decade career, mostly programming avionics systems but with a decade of Ruby on Rails towards the end. I am now sitting here eating popcorn and watching the disaster unfold. I am happy to be out of it. So long as it doesn't affect my pensions and the local shops still have food...
It's not unlikely that Donald Knuth looked at examples of 16th Century typesetting when he came to design TeX. Or looked at examples of typesetting that had been influenced by 16th Century typsetting.
He studied them diligently. His book Digital Typography gives lengthy accounts of his research and includes photographs and examples of how he chose various aspects.
I think it is a good general principle that, for any process that is likely to be a tempting target for scammers, you should require a non-electronic step to initiate that process. Requiring a physical letter of application for a job, for example.
I seem to remember (but I can't find the source) that Wirth initially had three aims in designing Pascal:
1. To use it in teaching a structure programming course to new students. As in the late 60's all student programming was batch mode (submit your program to an operator to run, and pick up the printout the following day), this meant the compiler had to be single-pass and give good error messages.
2. To use it in teaching a data structures course involving new data structures worked out by Wirth and Hoare.
3. To use it in teaching a compilers course. This meant the compiler code had to be clean and understandable. Being single-pass helped in this.
Sure, but all successful capitalist economies revolve around supporting commercial interests which prop up the tax revenue which then hold up the welfare state and public infrastructure, QoL and freedoms we enjoy.
THe big challenge is separating the good from the bad commercial interests. It's not a challenge because differentiating the good from the harmful is difficult, but because bad actor industries also make A LOT of money that buys a lot of political power and also employ a lot of people, so removing them from economy would have negative economic and political consequences.
Basically it's like a dead man's switch in a mutually assured destruction weapon.
Many years ago (or so it seems now), I was turned on to slime moulds by the photos of Kim Fleming on Flickr (https://www.flickr.com/photos/myriorama/albums/1271006/). The undersides of logs can be a good place to find them.
I’ve occasionally found them, but only when their color contrasts with the background during walks. Can they be found year round? Do they have a preference for logs?
I hadn't realised that Hoare was present when Meyer first used the term 'contract' to describe his ideas.
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