[Edu-sig] "dot notation" (in favor of sharing it)

[kirby urner]

On Thu, Oct 25, 2012 at 3:00 AM, gerry lowry +1 705 429-7550 wasaga
beach ontario canada <gerry.lowry at abilitybusinesscomputerservices.com>
wrote:
> Hello Kirby, i took a very brief look at your http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2012/10/dot-notation-again.html.
>
> There does not appear to be any way to comment at the above link.
>

Right, I've repurposed the blog format to serve my needs.  It's more a
journal and gives me brownie points within my "church" (Quakers are
expected to keep journals).

Turning on comments would mean an endless fight against bots (includes
humans who don't pass the Turning test) saying "wanna buy an iPod?"
all over my journal.  I always have ad words turned off too.

> there, i noticed your "More SQL too while we're at it" ..
>
> imho, i think the time has come for less SQL via more LINQ.
>
>     Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!
>     Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!
>     Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!
>
> LINQ is from the house that Bill built, however, see http://www.linqpad.net/WhyLINQBeatsSQL.aspx
>
> GOTO http://www.linqpad.net/ for a FREE awesome tool that also does SQL, including
> LINQ <==> SQL translation in some cases.
>

There's always they "gotta understand what the ancestors" wrote argument.

I have no problem with the "this is SQL, this was the tabulation
system of choice for several generations, still used today, but now we
also have..." approach.

Hollerith machines also of interest, "keeping tabs" more generally.

> PL/I died because it came from IBM and people hated IBM ...
> ergo, the PL/I baby was tossed out with the bath water.
>

We do study about IBM's business machines' utility in Nazi Germany,
per my Pycon presentation of 2009 ("we" being my brand of STEM teacher
-- we study population genetics and the pseudo-sciences that adhere to
to this kind of study).

> LINQ in spite of coming from "the evil empire" will not die
> imho because LINQ has too much inertia and is also too good.
>
>     -------------
>
> i've mentioned this long time ago in one of the python forums
> with regards to OLPC ...
>
> Kirby, your http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2012/10/dot-notation-again.html
> brings to mind iverson's "Notation as a Tool of Thought" wherein he quotes Whitehead:
>
>     "By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work,
>      a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and
>      in effect increases the mental power of the race."
>

Yes, APL was the first language I loved, and was interactive in a
console, whereas FORTRAN and PL/1 were more easily hated for not
having an REPL.

Later I went to dBase (dBase II... dBase IV, FoxPro, Visual FoxPro) --
always with an REPL.

Yes, Iverson's notion that a mathematical notation could (should) be
"machine executable" helped break down the prejudice that sees "math"
on the one hand and "computer languages" on the other (a dumb cultural
blindness).

I jumped into J pretty early, even before I got into Python.  I wrote
an article, 'Jiving in J' in which Kenneth Iverson himself helped
catch some typos:

http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/Jlang.html

> i suggest that the tool for the notation be iverson's J (http://www.jsoftware.com/);
>
> i suggest also that J can be taught K-12 (assuming we can teach teachers to teach, period*).
>
>                       * a period is also a dot.
>

We need students who can learn, period, is what we seemed to come to
at the Shuttleworth meeting.

http://mathforum.org/kb/message.jspa?messageID=7909704

This strategy doesn't hinge on getting the adult teachers up to speed.
 That's not likely to happen in most cases (teachers have no spare
time and in the US especially are not expected to innovate).

With a safe space to study, bandwidth, motivation, you don't need
anyone in your immediate radius to "know J" (or anything much of about
anything for that matter).

>     -------------
>
> BTW ............ FREE event:     APL at 50      2012.11.01
>
>      York University, Ontario, Canada:  http://www.cse.yorku.ca/museum/apl50/index.html
>

APL is wonderful.

However a lot of people who use it are just financial sector snobs who
want to be "indispensable" working for whatever investment house.
They love that it's cryptic and a barrier to mere mortals.  Perl
culture gets that way too.

Some coders want to write "precious" code that only they can read and
interpret at the end of the day.

I'm not a big fan of "cleverness for the sake of cleverness" although
I do like our bagpipe-playing unicyclist (a guy in the neighborhood).

Thanks for posting, sounds like we're on the same page to some degree.

Kirby