[Chicago] Question about Machine Language.

Tue Dec 8 17:45:26 EST 2015

If I had to program the Altair on a daily basis.... well, I don't think I
would have much to do with programming!!!  I think the lowest level
programming I've ever done was PLC programming while taking classes at a
vocational school.  ( Coyne-American Institute )  That was actually kind of
interesting, but I don't remember much of it anymore.  I think most
electrical engineers have to become very proficient at PLC programming.  I
was reading that the infamous Stuxnet virus is actually an example of a PLC
virus that sabotages the refinement of Uranium in nuclear power plants.  (
The virus actually sabotages the PLC's that control the machinery
responsible for the refinery process. )  Oddly enough, according to what I
read, more than half of the nuclear power plants affected are in the Middle
East!  This started as a computer science chat.... and now we're getting
into geography and politics!

On Tue, Dec 8, 2015 at 4:29 PM, Randy Baxley <randy7771026 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I tend to like to think that since everything breaks down into a hilo
> variation in charge that we represent with 0s and 1s that even I can deal
> with that level of math as long as I do not let the theoretical math
> discussions of 0 and singularity bother me.
>
> On Tue, Dec 8, 2015 at 4:04 PM, Rob Kapteyn <robkapteyn at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I actually have an Altair that I built in high school and I did a lot of
>> actual machine language programming.
>>
>> "Programming" involved scribbling op codes and addresses on dozens of
>> sheets of paper, translating those into octal binary codes, and keying them
>> into the front panel switches.
>> You could not do very much.  There was a game called "Kill the bit
>> <https://youtu.be/ZKeiQ8e18QY>" -- which I actually played ;)
>>
>> I remember how much my finger tips started to hurt after a while ;)
>>
>> I think it was educationally useful for me, as a 13-year old, to work on
>> that level, but I'm not really sure.
>>
>> -Rob
>> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKeiQ8e18QY>
>>
>> On Mon, Dec 7, 2015 at 3:41 PM, Lewit, Douglas <d-lewit at neiu.edu> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi there Thomas,
>>>
>>> I watched that video on the Altair 8800.  Oh my god!!!  How
>>> confusing!!!  How many years ago were engineers and programmers actually
>>> working with computers like that?  Wow!  It really makes me appreciate the
>>> abstraction of higher-level languages such as Python!
>>>
>>> Thanks for the YouTube link.  That was really interesting.... and also
>>> kind of frightening!
>>>
>>> Best,
>>>
>>> Douglas.
>>>
>>>
>>> On Mon, Dec 7, 2015 at 3:10 PM, Thomas Johnson <
>>> thomas.j.johnson at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Because:
>>>> * Different computers use different instruction sets (i.e., different
>>>> version of machine language)
>>>> * The compiler is almost certainly better than you are at generating
>>>> optimized machine language from your high-level language. See some examples
>>>> of the kind of optimization options gcc has here:
>>>> https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Optimize-Options.html
>>>> * Unless you are an expert at assembly, you will be more productive in
>>>> a higher level language
>>>> * We used to, and it wasn't pleasant
>>>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EV1ki6LiEmg
>>>>
>>>> On Mon, Dec 7, 2015 at 3:05 PM Lewit, Douglas <d-lewit at neiu.edu> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Thanks for the correction Naomi, but that didn't really answer my
>>>>> question.  Why don't we all just study machine language and that's it?
>>>>>
>>>>> On Mon, Dec 7, 2015 at 2:10 PM, Naomi Ceder <naomi.ceder at gmail.com>
>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> On 7 December 2015 at 13:57, Lewit, Douglas <d-lewit at neiu.edu> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Hi everyone,
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> I was reading an article on the web about how all programming
>>>>>>> languages are "Turing complete".  I believe that basically means that all
>>>>>>> programming languages are able to communicate with the computer's CPU using
>>>>>>> the binary codes of machine language.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Uh, that's not actually what "Turing Complete" means...  It doesn't
>>>>>>  have anything to do with binary or machine language... from Wikipedia (
>>>>>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness):
>>>>>>
>>>>>> "To show that something is Turing complete, it is enough to show
>>>>>> that it can be used to simulate some Turing complete system. For example,
>>>>>> an imperative language
>>>>>> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperative_language> is Turing
>>>>>> complete if it has conditional branching
>>>>>> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_branching> (*e.g.*, "if"
>>>>>> and "goto" statements, or a "branch if zero" instruction. See OISC
>>>>>> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_instruction_set_computer>) and
>>>>>> the ability to change an arbitrary amount ofmemory
>>>>>> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_memory> locations (*e.g.*,
>>>>>> the ability to maintain an arbitrary number of variables). Since this is
>>>>>> almost always the case, most (if not all) imperative languages are Turing
>>>>>> complete if the limitations of finite memory are ignored."
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Cheers,
>>>>>> Naomi
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Okay then.... so why don't we get rid of C, C++, Java, Python, Ruby,
>>>>>>> Perl, Ocaml, Haskell, C#, F#, etc, etc and why don't we call just code in
>>>>>>> machine language?  Bear in mind that I'm asking this question from the
>>>>>>> point of view of the Devil's Advocate because I know almost nothing about
>>>>>>> machine language.  But it's an interesting question.  It's related to the
>>>>>>> question, "Why don't we have one universal natural language?  Let's get rid
>>>>>>> of English, French, Spanish, German, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic,
>>>>>>> Hebrew, etc, etc, and replace them all with one universal language that
>>>>>>> everyone understands".
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> I'm interested in reading your thoughts and ideas.  Thanks.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Best,
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Douglas.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> P.S.  Sorry to hear about the Django Study Group.  I thought Mark
>>>>>>> Graves was very friendly and did a great job of demonstrating various web
>>>>>>> applications using Python.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>> Chicago mailing list
>>>>>>> Chicago at python.org
>>>>>>> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/chicago
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> --
>>>>>> Naomi Ceder
>>>>>> https://plus.google.com/u/0/111396744045017339164/about
>>>>>>
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>>>>>>
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