Program or be programmed quote by Douglas Rushkoff

I’ve just finished Program or be Programmed by Douglas Rushkoff. It’s a relatively short read (approx 150 pages) and tries to explain the need for understanding technology and creating (with) technology instead of just using it. I’m a advocate for programming literacy striving towards making people aware of the influence of technology on our society, so I just had to read what Rushkoff has to say about this.

At first I was not so impressed. The first chapters mostly felt like filler content. Actually I can’t even remember the main arguments brought forward in those chapters. However the last chapter really made up for this lack of content in the first chapters. I think the quote below sums this up nicely:

“For the person who understands code, the whole world reveals itself as a series of decisions made by planners and designers for how the rest of us should live. Not just computers, but everything from the way streets are organized in a town to the way election rules (are tilted for a purpose vote for any three candidates) begin to look like what they are: sets of rules developed to promote certain outcomes. Once the biases become apparent, anything becomes possible. The world and its many arbitrary systems can be hacked.”

Source: Program or be programmed

Recognizable for every web developer

Most webdevelopers I know are no fan of Microsoft‘s Internet Explorer. It has become a lot better with Internet Explorer 8, but still Internet Explorer usually doesn’t play nice and in general it is hard to debug issues on Internet Explorer.

So here’s a song (see also the embedded movie at the end of this post) by a guy who definitely has experienced these issues and wrote a song about Internet Explorer being mean again. This one is for al you web developers out there. Have a nice weekend! (more…)

Pseudocode and indentation

“In pseudocode we use indentation while in most languages they have begin, end delimiters. Curly braces or something like in Java or C for example. But we use indentation. The whole idea of pseudo code is to get the algorithms as short as possible, while still understanding what the individual steps are. In practice there’ve been languages that use indentation as means of showing the nesting of things. In general it’s a bad idea because when things move from one page to another for example you can’t tell what level of nesting it is. Whereas with explicit braces it is much easier to tell. So there are reasons why this is a bad notation when you are doing software engineering, but it’s a good one for us ’cause it keeps things short and thus fewer things to write down.”

By: professor Charles E. Leiserson in Analysis in Algorithms