Category: Programming Language

Newspeak (programming language) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

via Newspeak (programming language) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Newspeak is a programming language and platform in the tradition of Smalltalk and Self being developed by a team led by Gilad Bracha. The platform includes an IDE, a GUI library, and standard libraries.[1] Starting in 2006, Cadence Design Systems funded its development and employed the main contributors, but ceased funding in January 2009.[2]

Newspeak is a class based language. Classes may be nested, as in BETA. This is one of the key differences between Newspeak and Smalltalk. All names in Newspeak are late-bound, and are interpreted as message sends, as in Self.

Newspeak is distinguished by its unusual approach to modularity.[3] The language has no global namespace. Top level classes act as module declarations. Module declarations are first class values (i.e., they may be stored in variables, passed as parameters, returned from methods, etc.) and are stateless.

Stateless: retaining no information about previous events

Stateless means that a protocol (i.e., an agreed upon format or set of rules) or application program keeps no information one or more preceding events in a given sequence of interactions with a user, another computer, another program, device, etc.

Statelessness is the opposite of maintaining state. It offers the advantages that it can simplify programming and that it can reduce network traffic.

State is maintained by most modern application programs in order to ensure data consistency and facilitate ease of use. A major benefit is that it allows programs to remember what users were doing earlier in the same session in a program or in the previous times they ran the program. For example, it allows programs to retain the user’s configuration settings.

In contrast, much of the Internet and web is intrinsically stateless. For example, HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) by itself provides no means for maintaining state, and thus, without the use of special coding, each request for a new web page is processed without any knowledge of the pages previously requested. Because maintaining state is extremely useful, programmers have developed a number of techniques to add state to the web, including cookies and server APIs (application programming interfaces).

User datagram protocol (UDP), one of the core protocols of the Internet, is a stateless, transport layer protocol that runs on top of IP networks. Its stateless nature is useful for servers that respond to large numbers of small queries.

via Stateless: retaining no information about previous events.

In the Beginning… Was the Command Line – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In the Beginning… Was the Command Line – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

In the Beginning… Was the Command Line is an essay by Neal Stephenson which was originally published online in 1999 and later made available in book form (November 1999, ISBN 0-380-81593-1). The essay is a commentary on why the proprietary operating systems business is unlikely to remain profitable in the future because of competition from free software. It also analyzes the corporate/collective culture of the Microsoft, Macintosh, and free software communities.

Stephenson explores the GUI as a metaphor in terms of the increasing interposition of abstractions between humans and the actual workings of devices (in a similar manner to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance)[citation needed] and explains the beauty hackers feel in good-quality tools.

He does this with a car analogy. He compares four operating systems, Mac OS by Apple Computer to a luxury European car, Windows by Microsoft to a station wagon, Linux to a free tank, and BeOS to a batmobile. Stephenson argues that people continue to buy the station wagon despite free tanks being given away, because people do not want to learn how to operate a tank; they know that the station wagon dealership has a machine shop that they can take their car to when it breaks down.

Because of this attitude, Stephenson argues that Microsoft is not really a monopoly, as evidenced by the free availability of other choice OSes, but rather has simply accrued enough mindshare among the people to have them coming back. He compares Microsoft to Disney, in that both are selling a vision to their customers, who in turn “want to believe” in that vision.

Stephenson relays his experience with the Debian bug tracking system (#6518). He then contrasts it with Microsoft’s approach. Debian developers responded from around the world within a day. He was completely frustrated with his initial attempt to achieve the same response from Microsoft, but he concedes that his subsequent experience was satisfactory. The difference he notes is that Debian developers are personally accessible and transparently own up to defects in their OS distribution, while Microsoft “makes no bones about the existence of errors.”

Post Position » Lede, Based on a True Story

Post Position » Lede, Based on a True Story
“Sometimes I encounter language that sounds like it was computer-generated, or that sounds like it would be even better if it was. Hence, the slapdash “Lede,” which is based on the first sentence (no, not the whole first paragraph) of a news story that was brought to my attention on ifMUD.

This very simple system does incorporate one minor innovation, the function “fresh(),” which picks from all but the first element of an array and swaps the selection out so that it ends up at the beginning of the array. This means that it doesn’t ever pick the same selection twice in a row.”

Turing test – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Turing test – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The Turing test is a test of a machine‘s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour. In Turing’s original illustrative example, a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with a human and a machine designed to generate performance indistinguishable from that of a human being. All participants are separated from one another. If the judge cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test. The test does not check the ability to give the correct answer; it checks how closely the answer resembles typical human answers. The conversation is limited to a text-only channel such as a computer keyboard and screen so that the result is not dependent on the machine’s ability to render words into audio.[2]

The test was introduced by Alan Turing in his 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” which opens with the words: “I propose to consider the question, ‘Can machines think?'” Since “thinking” is difficult to define, Turing chooses to “replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words.”[3] Turing’s new question is: “Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?”[4] This question, Turing believed, is one that can actually be answered. In the remainder of the paper, he argued against all the major objections to the proposition that “machines can think”.[5]

In the years since 1950, the test has proven to be both highly influential and widely criticized, and it is an essential concept in the philosophy of artificial intelligence.[1][6]

Alan Turing – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Alan Turing – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Alan Mathison Turing OBE FRS (/ˈtjʊərɪŋ/; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was a pioneering English computer scientist,mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and theoretical biologist. He was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general purpose computer.[2][3][4] Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science andartificial intelligence.[5]

Turing machine – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Turing machine – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

A Turing machine is a device that manipulates symbols on a strip of tape according to a table of rules. Despite its simplicity, a Turing machine can be adapted to simulate the logic of any computer algorithm, and is particularly useful in explaining the functions of a CPU inside a computer.

The “Turing” machine was described by Alan Turing in 1936,[1] who called it an “a(utomatic)-machine”. The Turing machine is not intended as a practical computing technology, but rather as a hypothetical device representing a computing machine. Turing machines help computer scientists understand the limits of mechanical computation.

Turing gave a succinct definition of the experiment in his 1948 essay, “Intelligent Machinery”. Referring to his 1936 publication, Turing wrote that the Turing machine, here called a Logical Computing Machine, consisted of:

…an unlimited memory capacity obtained in the form of an infinite tape marked out into squares, on each of which a symbol could be printed. At any moment there is one symbol in the machine; it is called the scanned symbol. The machine can alter the scanned symbol and its behavior is in part determined by that symbol, but the symbols on the tape elsewhere do not affect the behaviour of the machine. However, the tape can be moved back and forth through the machine, this being one of the elementary operations of the machine. Any symbol on the tape may therefore eventually have an innings.[2] (Turing 1948, p. 61)

A Turing machine that is able to simulate any other Turing machine is called a universal Turing machine (UTM, or simply a universal machine). A more mathematically oriented definition with a similar “universal” nature was introduced by Alonzo Church, whose work on lambda calculus intertwined with Turing’s in a formal theory ofcomputation known as the Church–Turing thesis. The thesis states that Turing machines indeed capture the informal notion of effective method in logic and mathematics, and provide a precise definition of an algorithm or ‘mechanical procedure’.