[ExI] mit's answer to the stanford ai class

[Kelly Anderson]

On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 3:51 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
> -----Original Message-----
> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org
> [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Kelly Anderson
> Subject: Re: [ExI] mit's answer to the stanford ai class
>
>>...The problem is that self taught computer scientists frequently develop
> really bad habits in programming style that are terribly difficult to break.
> I have hired several very smart people who were self taught programmers, and
> have always at least partially regretted the decision. In my experience,
> particularly bad are Electrical Engineers turned programmers, because they
> have pretty darn big egos, and think that their way of programming is
> better. Sigh...
>
> How well I know it.  In 2002, I had a crazy-smart physicist working with me.
> I showed him how to use excel.  In 2002!  He thought it was the greatest
> invention since sex.  That was the last we heard of him for months, as he
> did what he was famous for doing: super obsessive laser beam study of a
> topic.  He wrote some interesting software in the macro language.

I had a professor Evan Ivie, brilliant guy, and a great computer
scientist, worked at Bell Labs with Kernihan and Richie and the gang.
He spent quite a while figuring out what the limits of programming in
the shell were... similar kind of story, I'd imagine. When all you
have is a hammer, suddenly, the whole world is a nail!!! LOL

> Tragically only a short time later the medics discovered pancreatic cancer,
> and he was gone within a few months.  I inherited his files.  So I reverse
> engineered some of what he had done.  I found instances where he had written
> out in macro code for a ton of functions that are available as spreadsheet
> functions, such as the conversions of hex to decimal and decimal to binary,
> etc.  Apparently had had somehow missed the complete list of spreadsheet
> functions available, so he was hard coding a bunch of that stuff.

Yes, but as a super genius, it was quicker for him to hand code it
than look up what was already available... LOL!!

There is a serious point here though, and that is that even very
serious computer scientists find it EXTREMELY difficult to produce
anything like good code using Excel. It just isn't a good tool for
producing serious software. There is no testing harness or framework,
for one thing... there is no control of execution, nor really an
explanation of how it works at any level of detail... Excel is a
disaster from a software engineering perspective.

That being said, it is the most popular programming environment in the
history of the world. So it go the user interface right, but didn't
support the "real" programmers of the world...

It would be lovely if you could take a spreadsheet, and decompile it
somehow and turn it into C# or something that could be maintained
after the original non-programmer prototyped it in Excel. I have done
some really intense Excel programming around the RTD (Real Time Data)
framework, and it was a nightmare to get it right.

>>...BTW, loved Spike's contributions to this thread, but couldn't think of a
> way to add much, other than maybe some comedic reference to Zen and the Art
> of Motorcycle Maintenance... LOL  -Kelly
>
> How did you know?  I looooved that book in college!  I recently paid a
> buttload of money for an original edition.  ZAMM is the introspective
> person's bible and guiding light!  I still think we should get a group
> together and go swipe Pirsig's bike, before some thieving yahoo steals it.
>
> Oh, wait...

LOL, it is a great book... I haven't read it for 20+ years though...

-Kelly