Notes On Notes On Postmodern Programming
0. Preamble
Let us go then, you and I,
When the code is spread against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Code Read #11 from Scott Rosenberg deals with James Noble’s and Robert Biddle’s “Notes on Postmodern Programming”.
1. A Sentimentalist’s Apology
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats,
Of all-night coding, of cheap cube walls,
Of pizza boxes in the halls:
I have a confession to make: I love arithmetic. Not the addition and multiplication of engineering, but the study of numbers themselves. From Euclid’s Algorithm to RSA Encryption, no other subject mixes such simplicity and such depth. Even more beautifully, there is still so much unknown. For example, from Richard Guy’s book “Unsolved Problems in Number Theory“: Is every even number greater than 4 the sum of two primes? Are there infinitely many primes which are one more than a square? Is there an odd number that is the sum of its own divisors? Nobody knows.
posted in CS Literature, Code Reads, James Noble, Postmodern Programming, Robert Biddle, Software Industry | 0 Comments
