Noulakaz

The blog of Avinash, Christina, Anya and Kyan Meetoo.

Archives for 2007

Three great technical books

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I’ve just discovered ProgrammingBooks.org and I find it great. I’m impatient to start contributing to it as soon as they solve their user signup problem as it is not working well presently.

In the meantime, here are three books I bought relatively recently and which I find excellent:

The second edition of Programming Ruby is extremely interesting to read (the first version is available freely online). It describes the Ruby programming language of course as well as its standard library. Ruby is an extremely expressive programming language as it allows the programmer to solve complex problems very easily. I’ve already written about my fascination with that programming language. The metaprogramming aspects of Ruby will blow your mind away!

Linux Kernel Development fully describes (and explains the rationale behind) the various subsystems found in the Linux 2.6 kernel. It’s one extremely complex and specialized subject that has been made simple thanks to the pedagogical talent of the author. Incidentally, my students have indirectly benefited from that book in the sense that I know a lot more about the kernel than before. Consequently I regularly ask them to investigate sections of the Linux kernel (e.g. the scheduler or the process creation mechanism) and write reports for me…

The third book is also another book that I’ve read cover to cover. The Inmates are Running the Asylum has an obscure title (at first) and it’s only when the author explains its meaning that you realize that this book is a gem. The Inmates are us, programmers. And the Asylum is the software that we are always trying to write. The point is that we, programmers, design the user interface of a software in order to please us and not the real end-user. Consequently, the software becomes difficult to use for the majority and therefore is not successful. The author argues that one should always use a goal-directed design approach. Incidentally, the author is the creator of Visual Basic but he does not like to use it to design user interfaces… I’ve already written on that.

The right to fail

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While reading a Slashdot discussion today, I stumbled upon an article in The Economist called Lessons from Apple. Here is (according to me) the most important paragraph:

“The fourth lesson from Apple is to fail wisely. The Macintosh was born from the wreckage of the Lisa, an earlier product that flopped; the iPhone is a response to the failure of Apple’s original music phone, produced in conjunction with Motorola. Both times, Apple learned from its mistakes and tried again. Its recent [operating system Mac OS X] have been based on technology developed at NeXT, a company Mr Jobs set up in the 1980s that appeared to have failed and was then acquired by Apple. The wider lesson is not to stigmatize failure but to tolerate it and learn from it: Europe’s inability to create a rival to Silicon Valley owes much to its tougher bankruptcy laws.”

My impression (and I can be wrong of course) is that entrepreneurship is revered in North America. So many young and bright people fresh from university have revolutionized the world we are living in. And some of them have succeeded after some very public failures (including a chronic incapability to graduate).

As the article points out, this does not generally happen in Europe. And, unfortunately, neither here in Mauritius…

The best way to introduce programming

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I’ve decided to teach the Programming Methodology course to first year Computer Science & Engineering students as from next academic year. I love programming. And I want to share my enthusiasm to the young people who join the CSE department. For me, programming is art and, fortunately, I am not alone to think that.

This is the course outline from the official CSE programme:

Pseudocode; Structured Programming Techniques; Program Structure; Simple Data Type; Control Structures; Modularity; Structured Data Types; Introduction to Object Oriented Programming; Programming Style and Testing, Abstract Data Types, Arrays, Linked Lists, Stacks, Queues, Trees, Graphs, Operations on Trees and Graphs.

(Astute readers will have noticed that ; (semicolons) are used initially and , (commas) afterwards – this is an indication that this one year-long course is the concatenation of two previous semester-long courses – Programming Methodology and Data Structures)

Lately, I have been discussing with some colleagues about the reasons why many of our current students have lots of difficulties to tackle this course. One reason might be that many of them have chosen CS for the bad reasons (I don’t want to get into that…) and they don’t have the necessary skills to be good programmers no matter what we do. Another reason might be the way the course is taught by focussing a lot on programming language constructs instead of solving problems. Another possibility might be the actual programming language used (i.e. C++) etc. etc.

I’ve realized that one good way to teach programming is to use the same techniques used in the best universities in the world. Naturally (and this has been pointed out to me by one colleague), there is a risk that what is good for exceptional students (like what you have in top universities) might be catastrophic for our Mauritian students but, personally, I don’t buy this. The first reason is that we are trying to teach art and, as far as I know, to learn art, one needs to have taste (aka aptitudes aka interest aka resonance etc.) That’s it. No need for 3 A’s at A-Level. The second reason is that we are a university and not a university– and therefore we should not lower our standards to accommodate more students. I’ll be direct. If the student cannot follow a university-level course, then he/she has no place in a university. Once I asked a professor from a South-African university about how to handle students who don’t like to read and she told me:

Throw them out!

Ok. This is drastic. But this is how universities become top universities. And this is how they help create the Silicon Valley.

Anyway, I looked at what is taught in top universities and I found out the following:

  • Harvard’s Introduction to Computer Science I – The course has three goals (i) to teach problem solving through the development of algorithms (ii) to teach computer programming as a means to express algorithms (iii) and to convey a broad picture of the different aspects of computer science in the real world. The programming languages used are C and Ruby. According to me, C is a beautiful language to understand what a computer is and Ruby is perfect to write algorithms solving complex problems as the language is so expressive.
  • Cambridge’s Foundations of Computer Science – At the end of the course, the student should (i) be able to write simple programs (ii) understand the importance of abstraction in computing (iii) be able to estimate the efficiency of simple algorithms (iv) and know how to use currying, higher-order functions and lazy evaluation. The programming used is the functional language ML.
  • Stanford’s Programming Methodology – The course covers fundamental programming concepts and software engineering techniques. It uses Karel the Robot which is a simulator to learn programming in Java.
  • And finally MIT’s Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs and Berkeley’s version – The course is an introduction to computer science, with particular emphasis on software and on machines from a programmer’s point of view. It concentrates mostly on the idea of abstraction, allowing the programmer to think in terms appropriate to the problem rather than in low-level operations dictated by the computer hardware. The programming language used is the functional language Scheme and the textbook is obviously the world-renowned SICP.

This is what I understand:

  • Focus is on solving problems (and not in low-level operations dictated by the computer hardware)
  • Very high-level languages (or environments) are used: Ruby, ML, Karel the Robot and Scheme. Interestingly, Harvard uses Ruby and C I guess to give the student a grasp of both worlds.
  • Three of the top five universities of the world use functional programming languages to introduce programming. I may be on the right track after all in my quest to learn Haskell. Incidentally, the first programming language I used at university when I was a student was Scheme.
  • Python is not used by the top 5 (Pascal Grosset won’t like that). Must be because it’s not different enough from C (apart from the syntax) i.e. it is not very high-level.
  • Those top university are not afraid to use non-mainstream languages and environments. This is an indication of being intelligent by the way: the people there think different!

My conclusion?

Let’s see. First of all, I’ll propose that the course be very progressive but ultimately tough. I’ll try to propose to my colleagues that we completely rework the lectures and lab sessions to focus on problem solving. I’ll also propose that we use a very high-level language. Scheme is great (especially DrScheme) but it might be a little too much for my colleagues. Haskell (and especially Hugs) might also be a little too much. Ruby is the next best choice. But I better find a good interactive and multiplatform and free environment first. Any idea?

(An update: I’ve (re)discovered jEdit which coupled with the Ruby Editor Plugin seems to be a fantastic free IDE for Ruby and it works on all platforms which run Java i.e. on everything!)

(Artwork by Piet Mondrian)