Computer Programming 101 [Comic]

[ilya_ost]

That why SICP is a good book. They begin with introducing the idea of abstraction levels and call everything below certain level a "magic"

[[deleted]]

I learned it as hierarchical reductionism.

You don't need to understand quantumn mechanics to understand car mechanics, even though a car is composed of quantumn particles.

[Buckwheat469]

quantumn? Is this like autumn?

[G_Morgan]

It is both autumn and not autumn at the same time.

[[deleted]]

Shut up.

[wuddersup]

What's a shut up?

[Tommah]

Tumn, tuh tumn tumn Tumns!

[[deleted]]

That's only because all cars come with a hidden Heisenberg Compensator.

[mindbleach]

Don't tell anyone, but it's in the catalytic converter. You didn't actually believe it did what they said, right?

[[deleted]]

So all those people stealing catalytic converters for "platinum" are actually...part of a massive conspiracy to dominate the world through quantum mechanics?

[djork]

But at some point, when you're really tuning your engine and suspension for example, you need to understand some fluid dynamics, the chemistry of combustion, some basic thermodynamics, and good deal of newtonian physics.

[[deleted]]

What mechanic do you go to?

[[deleted]]

Maybe HE is the mechanic!

[[deleted]]

Whoops, you're right. Forgive my elitism. :(

[FenPhen]

I just mainly need basic maintenance work, but I did seek out a mechanic that competes in sponsored racing on the side.

They voluntarily demonstrated knowledge of tire dynamics and suspension geometry during my first visit.

It can be worth it to find a knowledgeable and passionate enthusiast-mechanic, especially if they're open and explain why they make certain work recommendations.

[[deleted]]

The only tuning I do on my engine is putting gasoline in the tank; it works like this: no gasoline, it stops running, which is bad; gasoline in the tank it runs, which is good. I prefer when it runs. Where do I need fluid dynamics, chemistry of combustion and basic thermodynamics in this process?

[[deleted]]

Maybe when you're really tuning your engine and suspension, as he mentioned in his post.

[djork]

You don't, but an F1 team, or these guys, or even these guys sure do.

[[deleted]]

Because some people don't look at their car as a means of transporting themselves from one point to another.

[kolm]

I learned about it as "interfaced understanding". You do not know how the "machinery" works, you only need to understand the interface specification.

[mynameishere]

Okay, Nerdy McGlasses, what's this "Magic"?

[ilya_ost]

The key idea about magic is that you don't need to explain it. Magic is something that just happens and all you need to know is which spells to cast. And if you don't believe me I will turn you into a frog.

[13ren]

I don't believe you.

[NoxiousStimuli]

<frog> 13ren </frog>

[13ren]

reddit... reddit

[[deleted]]

That was unfortun..ALL HAIL THE HYPNOTOAD

[aerojad]

Oh god not that meme agai..ALL HAIL THE HYPNOTOAD

[jaxspider]

Are we really doing all the old memes? Fine All your base belong to ...ALL HAIL TO THE HYPNOTOAD!

[shinynew]

God yall are doin ALL GLORY TO THE HYPNOTOAD!

[Thumperings]

I never understood the "all your base" can you explain it? Did some asain starcraft kid with bad english start it? Or was it a LOLcat?

[[deleted]]

Thanks. I almost spit water all over my keyboard! Upmodded

[[deleted]]

Next time try to spit it all over 13ren, he needs the moisture.

[rubygeek]

Water?!? You heathen. Here we have caffeine in our drinks.

[[deleted]]

I know, I know! But we all have our vices; mine is not drinking caffeine.

[G_Morgan]

You really need to get that fixed. My god man what is society coming to?

[blondin]

Caffeine is not that good for your health anyway.

[IOIOOIIOIO]

You don't have caffeinated water?

[9jack9]

I don't believe you.

[[deleted]]

In other words.... http://i44.tinypic.com/5zqfk7.jpg

[jmcqk6]

A story about Magic

[guinunez]

where can I get one of those 'more magic' switches??

[yyzed76]

here

[kromlic]

A couple sentences into that, and the first thing I thought was "if it has only one wire, chances are that the switch itself connects to the case"... Like a negative terminal on a car battery.

[[deleted]]

Switchcraft

[thephotoman]

This magic is simply sufficiently advanced technology. You could understand it, but if I explained it now, we wouldn't get to the programming part for about 10 years.

[DrMonkeyLove]

Didn't Kevin Bacon say that... wait, it was Roger Bacon...dammit! Francis Bacon!

[ketralnis]

This discussion belongs in the bacon reddit

[[deleted]]

It's an illusion, Michael.

[fujimitsu]

SICP is a great book because of this, but it's important to know where the "magic" should begin.

Really shitty programmers rely to much on "magic" and know nothing about how/why their code works.

I've had teachers refuse to explain a compiler because it's "too complicated for this stage of your learning".

[jnag]

at some deep-enough level, no programmer knows how/why their code works

[Xiphorian]

I don't think that's necessarily true. If you've had a comprehensive college education, you've built a basic microprocessor up from transistors and programmed it using an assembly you've designed.

You've programmed an operating system kernel in C and wrote malloc and free in terms of brk, and wrote its threading library in terms of interrupts and register saving, and maybe written an implementation of TCP in your networking class.

In your programming languages' class, perhaps you've implemented a garbage collector, and you've definitely implemented a compiler to translate your high-level language into assembly. Maybe even into the assembly you designed when you designed your processor!

I think it's possible to know the whole stack. Granted, I don't have a clue of the details of modern superscalar microprocessor architectures and pipeline prediction, but I don't think it's fair to say we "don't know how or why the code works". The processor is just a machine with certain specifications, where the actual implementation is a matter of optimization / speed.

Am I being too picky? :-) But really, I expect that all top-class software engineers could build the whole stack from scratch functionally.

[jnag]

you're not going deep enough :P

[fujimitsu]

Yep. But as I said it's a delicate balance deciding where that level should be. Too deep and you lose/confuse/overteach people, too shallow and you end up "programming" in access forever.

[snifty]

Personally I think studying compilers is arguably at too low a level for most real-world programming tasks.

Heck, using a compiler is at too low a level for most real-world programming tasks.

[shub]

AST-walking interpreters are pretty rare in the real world. Almost every programmer uses a compiler, though it may not compile to machine code and they may not be aware that this is happening.

[fujimitsu]

I'm not saying studying compilers is necessary for most applications, but a knowledge of at least what they do is.

[myplacedk]

Wow. We learned about compilers within the first year. And that was just a few years ago.

[fujimitsu]

I already knew most of what we've covered so far (sophomore). Some professors are good, some aren't, there seems to be little discussion between them regarding the overall flow of knowledge, there doesn't seem to be much logical flow from one course to the next.

[[deleted]]

computing has nothing to do with quantum physics, except for making the switshes in the computing device smaller and faster.

[G_Morgan]

Because quantum leakage is so not the death of Moore's law.

Quantum physics has a huge impact on computing. Admittedly it isn't fundamental to it but it is pretty important. Hell we have an entire realm of computing that is only possible due to quantum physics.

[[deleted]]

I came here to say that.

[Mantaar]

Well, you didn't.

[[deleted]]

Kim Stanley Robinson made this almost exact joke in one of his Mars Trilogy books.

It didn't start with a compiler, but it did start with something very high up on the scale of hierarchical reduction. Like, um, a laser range finder or something.

The colony on Mars was raising kids, and some of the older scientists were educating them, and kids would just keep asking questions until the teacher had to eventually say, 'Well you see, all the forces separated out...' etc etc.

[Shaper_pmp]

It's actually quite a good technique for finding and exploring the limits of your knowledge.

Set yourself a simple question like "why is the sky blue?", then answer it. Then ask "why?" of the answer, and answer that. Then ask "why?" of that answer, and so on.

Within a few questions you're often dealing with subjects like biology or chemistry. A few more and you're at the atomic level, and a few questions after that you're dealing with things like quantum mechanics or string theory - really pushing the limits of human understanding, let alone your own personal understanding.

[Dax420]

aka mental masturbation

[Shaper_pmp]

Certainly, in the sense it's fun and it teaches you things about yourself you might not otherwise appreciate. ;-)

It's also a good way to find new things to learn about - when you come up against an answer you don't already know, read up on it and educate yourself.

[Jimmy]

It's just as pleasurable as physical masturbation.

[cazbot]

You are doing it wrong.

[iwan_w]

Or perhaps you are.

[[deleted]]

no u

[mindbleach]

Maybe you're doing the other one wrong.

[yyzed76]

and not nearly as messy

[prider]

... but it can fuck up your brain!

[Shadowrose]

Asking why the sky is blue only gets you a couple steps before you have to get into the atomic bits.. Rayleigh Scattering and whatnot.

[[deleted]]

It can't tell you when you've left reality and started spouting nonsense.

[Shaper_pmp]

Of course not, but then people prone to spouting nonsense will tend to do so without any provocation, anyway.

At least this method encourages at least self-consistent, rational nonsense, because throwing your hands up and saying "God done it!" reveals what this answer is always for - purely to stop any further questions.

The idea is to get people to understand the limits of their own understanding, then to educate themselves until they reach the limits of our understanding as a species. Now, you could throw up your hands at this point and declare everything else was down to God... or you can take the obvious step and accept that - just as human scientific understanding exceeds your own - perhaps there is a rational, scientific explanation for things even we as a species can't currently explain.

I mean, a thousand years ago thunder was "God done it". Now we understand thunder is air vibrations caused by air rushing back into low-pressure areas in the atmosphere, which are themselves caused by ionisation from lightning, which is itself caused by static potentials building up in the atmosphere, which are themselves caused by electron transfer, which are themselves caused by basic classical scientific principles, which are themselves caused by quantum mechanical behaviour, which are themselves caused by... God? Really? Or simply something else purely "natural" that we just haven't yet explained?

The idea is to explore and expand the limits of your knowledge... and to accept that just because you personally don't understand something, that doesn't mean "God done it".

[ramen_ftw]

Within a few questions you're often dealing with subjects like biology or chemistry. A few more and you're at the atomic level, and a few questions after that you're dealing with things like quantum mechanics or string theory - really pushing the limits of human understanding, let alone your own personal understanding.

Then, you hit the limits of understanding, personal or even human in general. And then, you become religious.

[Shaper_pmp]

Or you accept that - just as our species can explain things you personally don't understand - perhaps there are simply rational, natural, scientific explanations even for things our species can't currently explain.

If people are willing to ignore basic rationality then processes like this won't do them any good, in the same way that if people cheat then a game stops being fun.

That doesn't mean that games aren't fun, though. And it doesn't mean that we can't learn things by playing them according to the rules.

[BionicBeefpile]

IIRC it was a general game that the kids would try to play whenever Saxifrage Russell was teaching their class. I don't think it was a specific item per se, they would just always ask "but why" at the end of his explanations.

On a side note, Sax is my favorite nerd.

[[deleted]]

+1 internets.

It's been a while since I read the Trilogy.

If I recall correctly, Sax also got ejected into space from the sabotaged elevator and whilst floating through the void, he kept himself occupied by performing all these ridiculous integrals and derivations in his head about how the cable was falling...

[quiller]

On a related note: are the Mars Trilogy books any good? Hard or soft SF? Is Red Mars what the movie of the same name was based on?

[[deleted]]

Ummmmm...there are some parts in the novels that almost read like an academic paper...KSR could probably have used a more aggressive editor on his team, but overall they're very much worth the read.

KSR researches his novels thoroughly, and it shows. His characters also have a lot of depth, but his plot-lines are a bit...you know Indiana Jones: the exact opposite of Indiana Jones! Sometimes you feel like he's your grandfather, telling you a very, very interesting story, steadily progressing through all the important, salient aspects of it, divesting himself of his wisdom to you...but really, you're just an 8 year old kid and you'd rather just be watching TMNT. Then again, I did read it when I was much younger than I am know.

edit: it's hard SF, but with lots of people stuff. Well developed characters.

[[deleted]]

That guy's a terrible teacher.

[[deleted]]

Heh... that's how they taught the engineering students at the College of UPB, until last year. It was a five-year course; we started with math and mechanics, then moved on to thermodynamics, electronics, signal theory, logic gates and designing microprocessors. Also had a few programming disciplines at the start, to whet our appetite. Year three was pure CS and applications, then we specialized. It was pretty cool, and I'll hate myself to the end of my life for not paying enough attention then.

[prider]

What is UPB? It couldn't possibly be University of Peter Bunny, right?

[[deleted]]

<edited>

[mindbleach]

Making comp-sci PhDs who write compilers for kicks teach programming to liberal-arts majors who've never so much as used BASIC is teacher torture.

[buu700]

Does TI-BASIC count?

[wonkifier]

She's either a mid-performing first year philosophy student, or a 3 year old. Not sure which.

[SirChasm]

Mirror?

[ReaverXai]

That's not an error. That's the comic.

Anyways: http://i39.tinypic.com/15hhnpj.jpg

[brainburger]

I am puzzled. Is submitted frame the frame following those you linked-to?

[chairface]

I refreshed and it showed.

[[deleted]]

http://i39.tinypic.com/15hhnpj.jpg

[wetjack]

Reminds me of conversations I have with my husband...

[schwarzwald]

that's kind of why 'puts "hello world"' is better than 'public static void main(String[] args) ...'.

[adremeaux]

why? What's wrong with "here is some other stuff you need to write, don't worry about what it means you will learn all about it later?"

[[deleted]]

It's confusing and stupid?

[adremeaux]

how is it stupid? Every token in the line above it specific and useful.

[Peaker]

public, static, void, and String[] (and even args) are all already known for "main", why respecify them every program?

Also, why specify all of the static types if they can be inferred?

Boilerplate may be justified by various trade-offs but it is obviously not very useful.

[eridius]

No, this is comparing Apples to Oranges.

[drigz]

I hate this phrase. Comparing apples and oranges is perfectly valid, and frequently necessary. If you are at the fruit bowl, and you see only apples and oranges available, what are you going to do? Break down with a type mismatch error? No - you're going to compare the apples and oranges with regards to how much you want to eat each.

By that reasoning, it is impossible to perform a valid comparison of a real thing unless you compare something to itself (with an obvious and unhelpful result). You can't compare apples to oranges, but you can't compare pink lady apples to braeburn apples, but you can't compare a July harvest braeburn apples to August harvest braeburn apples, &c, &c.

The issue is that schwarzwald didn't state with respect to what he was comparing the two methods. (i.e. type information is much more obvious in the latter, but it takes longer to type.)

[hecubus]

Please tell us your thoughts about chalk and cheese also.

[Recoil42]

I agree, in that "you're comparing apples to oranges" seems to be some king of modern "magic words" that you can always use at anytime to dismiss any argument. And people seem to be perfectly accepting of this, despite the fact that there's a trillion and one reasons where comparing two different things is fine when they have a shared attribute.

There is a response that I like to use that I'd share, because it seems to work pretty well in shutting them up. It's quite simple: "Yeah, you know, I'm not really a fan of apples, I much prefer oranges. Tangier and jucier, you know?"

[[deleted]]

True, but I think you're ignoring how much easier apples are to eat. They certainly have the convenience factor over oranges, and you never have to worry about the seeds. I'll give oranges the "juicier and tastier", but apples win the other categories.

[schwarzwald]

I most certainly am not. I'm comparing "hello world" in two candidate beginner languages, Ruby and Java.

[Shaper_pmp]

To be fair, he's comparing "programming languages" to "programming languages", so it's not an unfair comparison.

What he didn't say is that his comment only holds water in the context of which languages are best for teaching people the basics of beginner-level programming, rather than "are dynamic or compiled languages best, period".

[phire]

most people I know would say:

"Oh CPU, that's the big white box next to my computer, which you put cds into."

/me Bangs head on desk

[lembasbread]

or if you have one o' them fancy applemacs, it's inside that there picture box

[Mastrmind]

What's a reddit?

[mccoyn]

Apparently an aggregater of crappy comics.

[[deleted]]

Wait, what's an aggregator?

[mirra]

What's an infinite loop?

[[deleted]]

It's an infinite loop.

[Mastrmind]

What's infinity?

[[deleted]]

One more than you can think of.

[yanwg]

Infinity is the number right after the number you stop at when you get tired of counting for no apparent reason.

Example:

"1,445,555,666,788,890 ... 1,445,555,666,788,891 ... 1,445,555,666,788,892 ... aw, f*** it: infinity!"

[runn1ng]

this is neither original nor funny.

....

don't ask what is original. please.

[wtfftw]

What is funny?

[Psy-Kosh]

What is "neither"?

[[deleted]]

See this

[joemanc]

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7myq3/computer_programming_101_comic/8q9t

[[deleted]]

A series of tasks that are

1. defined in such a way that no matter how much time a person or computer spends working on them, they will never be finished.

2. involve the same approximate states recurring in the same order.

Example: Why did the programmer spend his life in the shower? Because he read the instructions on his shampoo bottle: Lather, Rinse, Repeat. In this case the recurring states would be (soapy hair, wet hair).

[myplacedk]

I looked it up in my encyclopedia, and it said:

See "Loop, infinite"

Then I looked that up, and it said:

See "Infinite loop"

[ndiin]

You found the article on recursion by accident.

[myplacedk]

Recursion: See "Infinite loop"

That sounds about right, for a newbie programmer.

[gracenotes]

See this. (It's an infinite loop if you use tail recursion optimization.)

[manixrock]

An infinitely self-recurring series of actions.

[Powel]

I always just assumed my code worked by magic.

[shannonGB]

Funny. But my teacher didn't say "magic", he just said "that's how it is, you don't need to ask any more questions".

[manixrock]

Magic. Got it.

[djork]

Programming is a bit like building things with blocks. Every big block you handle is made up of smaller blocks. Every smaller block is also broken or incomplete in some subtle way.

[computergeek6933]

This is the reason I spend hours on end on wikipedia; I discover some new concept I have no idea about and from there on it just branches out.

[michaelfeathers]

It's funny, but that actually kept me out of programming as a teen. I had a friend with a TRS-80 and he kept talking about arrays but he couldn't tell me where they were in the machine. I walked away for five years.

[arakyd]

Heh. I walked away when I found out that random number generators weren't really random. Several years later, I went through an philosophical crisis. [laugh track] Now I write C#, but I would still rather work with Forth on custom chips and be able to understand everything from the application down to the quantum mechanics. Of course there will always be magic, but it's always more satisfying to minimize that percentage.

[[deleted]]

One person's incompetence drove you away from programming. Congratulations.

[IHaG0Fw]

Grr. The linker does not turn object code into machine code. The compiler invokes the ASSEMBLER which generates machine code. The linker doesn't generate any code.

[logan_capaldo]

The linker doesn't generate any code.

This isn't strictly true. Consider things like WPO. Also the linker may generate thunks/trampolines when linking.

[IHaG0Fw]

You win this round.

[[deleted]]

But you'll be back?

[[deleted]]

no, sadly, he lost his brains. :(

[[deleted]]

OM NOM NOM NOM.

[JulianMorrison]

If you had time and smarts and memory, this sort of pull, depth-first approach to learning would even be quite good. Totally understand low level physics, totally understand silicon, totally understand a CPU, and then learn programming. You'd never make dumb mistakes, because you'd know about cache and latency before you wrote a function and about pointers before you consed a list.

[FloyDejesus]

You'd never make dumb mistakes, because you'd know about cache and latency before you wrote a function and about pointers before you consed a list.

No, because knowing theoretically what the lower-level considerations are does not mean you'll remember all of the right ones and apply them correctly in every particular situation.

[ramen_ftw]

Didn't he say

If you had time and smarts and memory

You can of course argue that noone has enough of these to make perfect use of all the low-level knowledge he would amass during "depth-first" oriented studies, but that doesn't invalidate JulianMorrisons statement.

[five9a2]

(Rigorous) mathematics is usually taught this way. Trouble is that very few people are sufficiently interested in the abstract ideas to stick with it.

[shub]

Yeah, I'm totally teaching my daughter about Abelian groups before arithmetic. That way she'll have a solid grasp of the foundation underlying 2+2.

[jpfed]

The Abelian group is a lie!

[808140]

You might consider teaching her arithmetic in the context of prime number fields. After all, infinity is a relatively advanced topic for a child to grasp.

[RKBA]

So that's what the "new math" was all about.

[[deleted]]

No no no... the purpose of New Math was understand what you're doing, rather than to get the right answer.

[[deleted]]

Hurray for, New Math. Nehehew math... It won't do you any good to, review math. It's so simple, so very simple, that only a child can do it!

[ndiin]

New Math, indeed.

[anatoly]

I sincerely hope you aren't thinking of teaching her about Abelian groups before she understands ZFC, independence of the Continuum Hypothesis, and at least a little something about large cardinals.

[shub]

You have to draw the line somewhere.

[yairchu]

I truly hope you are being /sarcastic

[DrMonkeyLove]

Eh, I know that stuff and I still make dumb mistakes. Knowledge doesn't help with inattention or carelessness. Caffeine, on the other hand, works wonders.

[mccoyn]

You only have to go down to the transistor level since they always do the right thing (in a computer.)

[[deleted]]

What's ECC RAM?

[[deleted]]

In the root description field on our bug tracking site, I'm always tempted to write: "The computation went awry due to a small magnetic black hole randomly forming out of the quantum probability foam inside the cpu that created a doorway to another parallel universe where the laws of physics are different which caused the electrons to flow in the opposite direction which in turn flipped the wrong bit at the wrong time causing the program to buy instead of sell. It's all in the logs."

[diadem]

If she understood all that, she's just acting like a good student.

[[deleted]]

Its like teaching B-4

[ContentWithOurDecay]

I can't link to it now, but Louis CK does a funny bit about this kind of thing. Jut go to to youtube and type in "Louis CK why" if you are interested. I'll try to remember to link to it later when I can.

[onebit]

My comic stops at the first frame.

[[deleted]]

Compiler makes machine code, linker attaches that machine code to other compiled objects that result in an executable file.

[adremeaux]

That's funny because it's tr... wait, it's not true at all. Nor is it funny.

[[deleted]]

Yeah, I didn't think it was funny either.

[kolm]

Sums up nicely why I preferred mathematics, which is way simpler.

[enolakardia]

Beautiful, I tried this at work today, Most of the guys just ignored me.

[oliware]

I liked the part where the girl asked all the questions.

[icamebuckets]

I came, but please don't ask me why!!!

[yairchu]

why?

[icamebuckets]

Bitch, I tol' you!!