It is not so much the computer manufacturers, that want to do as if they sell an easy product; it is not so much the managers of software projects, that would like to view the programming activity as…

The programmers were horrified too: they derived their intellectual excitement from not quite understanding what they were doing and their professional satisfaction from finding weird bugs they had fi…

because they found the human mind too difficult and elusive an object for their study, turned to the study of rats instead, and even restrict that study —as I saw expressed recently— “to the most mech…

Should I have asked him, why mathematicians have not developed a notation that would enable everyone, no matter how ill-equipped otherwise, to do mathematics? EWD #540…

In the world around us we encounter two radically different views of programming: * View A: Programming in essence is very easy. * View B: Programming is intrinsically very difficult. EWD #540…

I don’t know if I can take hearing another self-aggrandizing nincompoop get up on stage and tout their amazing software Zack Morris, “The State of the Art is Terrible” (!)…

Let us now turn our attention to computing science. It is hated, of course, like any other science. In order to understand the specific distaste it evokes, and along with it all the pressures exerted…

In view of the preceding it becomes quite obvious why many earlier efforts to concoct Computing Science Curricula at our universities have been such dismal failures. They were just cocktails! For lack…

The confusion is perhaps most clearly demonstrated by the often expressed opinion that “one cannot use a programming language that has not been implemented”. But this is nonsense, of course one can! O…

Back, oh, eight years ago, a friend of mine had set up a private bulletin board for a bunch of us. In theory, the common theme was gaming (a bunch of us were moving from MMO to MMO like a herd of graz…

Operational : M ( P ) |= σ -> σ’ Denotational : M ( P ) |= κ -> P’ ie. In Operational semantics the meaning of a program is a transition function on a virtual machine, in Denotational semantic…

… the first challenge for computing science is to discover how to maintain order in a finite, but very large, discrete universe that is intricately intertwined. And a second, but not less important ch…