Creating a Computer Science Canon (2003) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Creating a Computer Science Canon (2003) [pdf]

l3d.cs.colorado.edu

89 pointslainon31 comments

It is ironic that a paper calling for a CS canon does not follow any of the ACM or IEEE formatting guidelines for submitting a paper, such that a reader could tell when it was published.

So this paper came out at some point in the last... fifteen years?

edit: thanks for updating this with the date

That the HN headline was updated with the date does not make your point any less valid. All content needs to have a date on it. (And as long as I'm ranting about this, the word "latest" should never appear as a substring in any title or file name unless it's a symlink.) People seem to continually lose sight of the fact that it will not always be now.

PDF info says 2002

Can we put together all the listed papers here? Reply with one if you know where it is. One paper per reply please.

My personal favorite, Shannon's A Mathematical Theory of Communication: http://worrydream.com/refs/Shannon%20-%20A%20Mathematical%20...

Heh, just found a mistake in this paper:

"A device with two stable positions, such as a relay or a flip-flop circuit, can store one bit of information. N such devices can store N bits, since the total number of possible states is 2^N and log(base2) 2^N =􏰃 N."

This is true only if the devices/bits are in a known order. If they are unordered, then N devices can store only log(N) bits of information (because the state of the system is completely characterized by the number of 1 bits, and that ranges from 0 to N).

This is not a completely academic observation. For example, if you have two thumb drives, each of which stores N bits, the two of them together store 2N bits ONLY if you can tell which drive is which. If you can't distinguish them, then the sum total of information they contain is 2N-1 bits.

> This is true only if the devices/bits are in a known order.

I think that's an assumption.

Aiken, "Proposed Automatic Calculating Machine": http://history-computer.com/Library/AikenProposal.pdf

Backus, "Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style? A Functional Style and Its Algebra of Programs": https://github.com/emintham/Papers/blob/master/Backus%20-%20...

Berkeley, "Giant Brains, or Machines that Think": https://monoskop.org/images/b/bc/Berkeley_Edmund_Callis_Gian...

Boole, "An Investigation into the Laws of Thought": https://books.google.com/books?id=DqwAAAAAcAAJ&printsec=fron...

Bush, "As We May Think": https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...

There was a companion piece 20 years later in the Atlantic, by Greenberger. Both are linked from here:

https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/flashbks/compu...

von Neumann, "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC"

Mimeograph: https://archive.org/details/firstdraftofrepo00vonn/

Retypeset: https://archive.org/details/vnedvac/

Sutherland, "Sketchpad: a Man-Machine Graphical Communication System"

http://worrydream.com/refs/Sutherland-Sketchpad.pdf

Tarjan, "Depth-first search and linear graph algorithms"

http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~gilbert/cs240a/notes/TarjanDFS.pdf

They're probably all on sci-hub and/or library genesis.

Smith, "A Source Book in Mathematics"

https://archive.org/details/sourcebookinmath00smit

Contains the writings by Leibniz and Pascal on calculating machines.

Ada Lovelace's Notes on the Analytical Engine

Sketch of The Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage; By L. F. MENABREA of Turin, Officer of the Military Engineers; from the Bibliothèque Universelle de Genève, October, 1842, No. 82; With notes upon the Memoir by the Translator ADA AUGUSTA, COUNTESS OF LOVELACE

https://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html

Lovelace's notes start about one third of the way down the page.

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=ZGVmYXVsd...

Mindstorms: Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas by Seymour Papert

This was kindly made officially available online after his death.

The first three paragraphs in chapter 2 are thought-provoking in that they challenge you to shift from a transactional model of consumption of information - "I need to read these books to achieve something" - to one that is more instructional - "I need to read these books to learn how to think".

I was a little surprised by the list of works included in the canon until I realized after a more careful reading that it's more of a reading list for a particular class the author appears to teach.

I'd love to see an actual CS canon some time. Anyone know of anything that comes closer to one?

1- https://teachyourselfcs.com/

2- http://mfleck.cs.illinois.edu/building-blocks/

I'd love it if some more people could vouch for these sources. The both look very interesting.

They're both interesting but they're not "canons" in the traditional sense. The first is a short resource of the bare-bones subjects in CS with the handful of most popular books, and the second is an intro book about basic math and algorithms.

edit: to add, I think they're interesting but I would not refer people to them.

Hi! I co-wrote the first one, and it is definitely not intended to be a CS canon. Those books are our suggested resources for folk teaching themselves computer science, and were evaluated on that basis alone. We included not-great books where they're still the best we've found for a particular topic. Equally we excluded dozens of amazing books that are outside the scope of the resource.

What would be next level is to find the papers, then also find prominent programmers/professors etc to do a youtube series and discuss said papers. I'll take a stab at reading the papers, but like great works of literature I'm sure I'll miss things that a more educated person could highlight. Imagine someone like Alan Kay expounding on one of "The Canon" for ~15-20 minutes.

Came to see the CS Cannon. Left learning how to differentiate Canon and Cannon.

Canon is a short Cannon, for close quarters shelling or installation on narrow ships.

This is my headcanon now. Do not confuse with a head cannon.

Is a head cannon a device for projecting noggins or an article of millinery?

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