ht_th

No. Given a formal specification of a problem, one could use this logic to derive a correct program. In theory, that's great because it is proven error-free. In practice, of course, implementing a "correct program" can introduce bugs and running it on a non-ideal machine (i.e. any physical computer), introduces uncertainties.

Furthermore, it is expensive to do: you need people with a strong understanding of mathematics/computer science, it is time intensive, and for most applications, just writing a program is good enough. But, to be honest, that goes for most formal methods. Well, unless they're completely automated, of course.

I'm not sure there are clear lists with "startups", the knowledge of them seems to be embedded in the network surrounding these companies. I did find one site with a bunch of companies on the High Tech Campus (in Eindhoven): http://www.hightechcampus.com/companies/, many of which are or were startups. Furthermore, there are a couple of startup meetups (meetup.com) and other startup initiatives in these cities/areas you can contact for more detailed information.

> According to me, the dutch startup scene is like any other european startup scene. Theres always few success stories and alot of failures.

I agree with you.

To be honest, the high tech and industrial start ups I know of don't identify with the startup scene much. They're seriously working on solving a problem or pushing some new tech to market; they care about something more tangible than an app and growing big. In contrast, all the startup bootcamps, startup meetings, and other startup hypes seem to focus on apps and starting up as an aim in itself. But, given my background in research, I seem to be biased in my preference for startups with more depth with respect to research and development.

There are two very different "startup scences" in the Netherlands. The social/cultural/financial startups seem to aggregate around Amsterdam. For the more interesting and high tech stuff you have to look at Delft, Twente, and in particular the Eindhoven areas. For food and agricultural stuff, the place to be is the Wageningen area. Often, from an international or Hollandish perspective, the Netherlands is equated to Amsterdam and vice versa, but that results in a very skewed image of the Netherlands and the startup scene in particular.

(For example, on the website you refer to, there seems to be only one Eindhoven area job and that's for front-end development to boot. Apparently, this website does not give a good representation of start-up jobs in the Netherlands, but focuses on Randstad webdevelopment jobs instead.)

> I guess what I'm saying is that an undergraduate CS degree is just a vocational degree.

I think my undergraduate CS degree contained exactly four courses that I would classify as pure vocational in nature: the first class everyone had to take was to learn to program in Delphi; a class on functional programming; a class on GUI programming; and a class on object oriented programming. After that, all classes were either:

- mathematics, from analysis, statistics, writing/reading proofs, to loads of discrete mathematics

- formal methods, from proving correctness of programs, modeling, to different methods to analyze complex systems

- theory, from automata theory, language theory, compiler theory, database theory, relational algebra, to complexity and computability

- odds and ends, such as ethics, philosophy, history

Then, each trimester, we also had an engineering project where we would have to apply theory. There were no vocational classes associated. If we had to, or wanted to, use a tool, language, system, we had to learn it by ourselves first. Nevertheless, these engineering projects can be seen as vocational in nature too, of course. Still, that makes for about one vocational class a year (of about 15), and three engineering projects a year.

So, when people talk about undergraduate computer science degrees, I always assume their experiences are not dissimilar to mine.

Certainly, if all you're after is a degree (the certificate), not much effort is needed. On the other hand, if you want to, you can get more out of college. Which brings me back to my "good computer science education": it depends a lot on the aims of the student and how she approached her learning. That is not to say that there are no computer science programs that is basically vocational training, nor that there are programs that are very theoretical in nature, of course, but if you want, you can get more value for your money than a degree.

> Would you think someone needs a CS degree if they already have a good understanding of the books?

To be a programmer? No. But, at least to me, programming related matters is but a small part of computer science. Which makes Knuth's books such a great resource: it goes into detail in that small, yet quite large, field of programming.

I agree with you. It might make for an interesting course: the teacher develops instructional materials fitted for the class she's teaching, using Knuth's chapter as a reference and foundation, guiding and challenging students to dig deep on this topic. I'd like such a class, both as a teacher and a student, I think.

Everyone with a good computer science education should be able to digest his books. I know that around here college education is often derided as outdated, impractical, too costly (which is a USA-ian problem), or outright irrelevant, but what Knuth writes about ain't rocket science yet important for many a programmer to understand. He writes in a quite readable style about the fundamentals of programming and computer science theory that's relevant to that programming. I know most programmers mostly glue together prefab components into working systems that successfully serve millions, but if one wants to go beyond the surface, to ask why it all works the way it does, a good computer science education is an advantage.

Thanks for correcting me. Yes, they often tend not to keep right, but, I presume, cycle a "safe" distance from the right hand side of the road. Of course, in doing so, they hinder both cars and cyclists who want to pass.

It's close to the summer holidays, come and spend some time bicycling in the Netherlands, it is a great, safe, and relaxing experience. (Assuming you know how to cycle properly, that is; I've seen foreigners and tourists do very dangerous things on their bikes, such as swaying, riding on the right, looking back when signaled to move out the way, braking instead of overtaking when someone wants to pass, riding too slow, difficulty estimating other traffic and as a form of conflict behavior stopping halfway crossing a road, riding on ill-fitting bikes, and over-all they behave quite insecurely.)

I see similar things happen around here (oddly enough often also in small rural schools?). As a pessimist, I wonder:

- are teachers able to choose, remix, adapt, or make new "computational" instructional materials like they are able to do with conventional instructional materials? (Stencilling and xeroxing for the win :-)

- are computers only used as supporting tools (i.e., typewriter, encyclopedia, drawing board, ...) or is computational thinking integral part of the curriculum?

- is there software like programming tools, CAS (such as maxima, or matlab, or mathematica), CAD, and other configurable and programmable professional tools available? (and will they be used beyond a module of two weeks here or there?)

- has the (core) curriculum changed at al or are we still teaching topics like it is 1982? Computer technology makes it possible for students to tackle complex authentic problems instead of "school problems" (Death to linearity! Away with nice round numbers!)

I think that Parent made the observation that it is sad that in our information society people (in responsible positions (regarding ICT)) don't know about the fundamentals of the information society. At least, that's what I took from it and I concur.

We, as a society, should have started integrating computational thinking (Wing, 2006) as a core competency in the k-12 curriculum from the late 1980s onwards. We didn't.

anecdote

In 1991, I was in 5th grade, I saw the first computer enter the classroom in my primary school. It wasn't used but for some remedial mathematics training for a students or two and I believe the teacher did a computer course with it.

In 2010 I became a high school computer science teacher. There were three computer rooms (about 30 computers each) for the whole school (of about 1500 students) running windows XP + IE 6. Besides my class, the computer rooms were mostly used for making reports and "searching for information". Some departments did have specialized software installed (most of which came with the text books), but used it sparingly at best. On top of that, these software was mostly simple, inflexible, mostly non-interactive, non-collaborative, and "pre-fab" instructional materials. Often this software was not much more than a "digitized" version of parts of the text book with some animations, games, and procedural trainers mixed in.

That's an interesting question, now you've made me think about it. Let me write the same program in ALGOL 60 first, which would have been considered an imperative language and was relatively "close to the metal" to our standards:

    integer procedure Fib (n); integer n;
    begin
        if n = 0 then
             Fib := 0
        else if n = 1 then
             Fib := 1
        else Fib := Fib(n-1) + Fib(n-2);
    end Fib
        

Besides the obvious differences in syntax, I'd say that the procedure/method/function/subroutine is the same. Still, a more fundamental difference is the "distance" from the machine. In ALGOL 60 we almost see through it the implementation in machine code / assembler (or whatever mix between the two were actually used in those days) where a call to a subroutine meant mutating state: the calls, their arguments, and the results had to kept track of on the stack. For ALGOL 60 programmers of the time, their operational understanding of this snippet and ALGOL was imperative.

Compare that to Ruby in its modern context. Implementation details have been abstracted away in both language and in programmers' operational understanding of how the example and Ruby works. If I use and understand a machine that speaks Ruby—a way to look at using a programming language is to imagine a machine that has that programming language as its machine code—, there's no mutation, only a variable sequence of calls to fib written succinctly in a recursive manner. How's that different from functional programming? To be honest, I don't know. Maybe we should start interpreting "imperative" and "functional" differently than our predecessors did. Or, maybe these distinctions are getting less and less meaningful the more abstract a language or computing environment?

(As an aside, it is also interesting you use "accumulated", as for most ALGOL 60 programmers the accumulator in the arithmetic unit of their massive computers would take a prominent place.)

The difference between his two fibonacci implementations is recursiveness, not "fp-ness". You could write fib in a imperative style that is close to the mathematical definition and readable to boot, for example, in ruby:

    def fib(n) 
        case n
        when 0, 1
            n
        else
            fib(n-1) + fib(n-2)
        end
    end
  
    puts fib(10) # => 55

Although I do agree that is has become harder to start anew without your past catching up with you, in my experience of growing up in a small community, if you did something bad or just had a bad name, people would learn about it two towns over when you would start dating someone there, or trying to get a job, or moving there. The "social network" might seem all revolutionary, but what has changed most is the scale of the network, both in nodes, geographical spread, and memory, not the social aspect as such.

However, where we could escape the confines of the small-town community by moving to the city or even further away, nowadays even moving to the other side of the world isn't going to help much any more unless you find someplace off the grid. It is something to worry about.

Maybe changing your name might work, though, as long as Internet search engines aren't smart enough to connect your new name to your old one that's plastered all over the Internet.

Having grown up without a television, I never understood this 'convenience' because whenever I watch a video, I cannot do another thing. I never learned to work with a television in the background, and as a result, if I don't give a video my full and undivided attention, I don't remember almost nothing from it. On the other hand, when I was a kid, I got used to listen to (news) radio while reading or doing other stuff. I have no trouble following an audio program while doing some other cognitive intensive task.

Of course, with the popularisation of using videos for "all the things" lately, I don't feel at home at many a (popular) website any more. But that's another matter entirely, I suppose.

Growing up in the late 20th century, I cannot imagine not having gone to university. Without it, I'd still live in a small village and probably doing some menial work in a factory or on a farm. I would not have had the experience of focussing on a subject for five years straight. I would not have had the experience of being able to reflect on society and my role in it. I would not have had the experience of discovering ideas far beyond my imagination during my teenage years.

Was it worth it? To me, certainly. To society at large? The society being a post-industrial society morphing into an information society, having yet another worker for factories or farms that do not need it, does not seem to be a good contribution. I went to university, and because of that I contributed in ways I would never have been able otherwise: I've taught in high school; I've done historical research at a university; and I've done research on how to better prepare our children for participation in the information society. But was it worth it?

To be honest—without being a reductionist—, my contributions to society are slim. Maybe I've effected one or two students in a way that will set them on a path true contribution to society. Maybe I've effected others to take a wrong turn. I don't know. And my research? In the end its target audience was a small research community and, although I've been cited enough, its impact is just a drop, if that at all.

But that is just me. I imagine that your stories and those of other who went to university are similar in a way. Our contributions might be tiny, but what about taking together all of our tiny contributions?

Actually, I think that once intelligence and beauty can be "fixed", one could argue that the line between being disabled intelligence-wise (or aesthetically-wise) or not starts to shift. All those millions of children who, in your scenario, don't have to live with a disability will also be at a steep disadvantage compared to the extra smart and beautiful rich kids. If this would continue for some generations, you'll get a genetic upper and lower class. It could even mean that we create a new "super species" that's becoming less and less compatible with humans .

(Yes, I read way too much science fiction, but I think it explores some interesting scenarios we should seriously consider while debating the issue. For a very popular reference: In the Star Trek universe the Eugenic Wars explore problems of genetic enhancements; The character Doctor Bashir in DS9, for example, is an (illegally) enhanced human [http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Julian_Bashir])

> I've really been surprised at what an effect its had on me socially.

One of the odd things that happened is that I've become more extrovert when I do meet people. To off-set working alone at home, I volunteer two days a week at the local hackerspace to socialize. That has been a blast.

The problem I have with this question is that it is at the end of the interview. The questions I had, I asked during the interview. The questions I have after reflecting on the interview I can ask the next time (or not, as it often happens), but I almost always answer this question with "No", followed by summarizing my experience during the interview, telling what I learned about the company/job/other person, and see if something else comes up.

If the interviewer wants to know if I have learned all that he/she wants me to have learned during the interview, he/she should ask more specific questions.

I know that in many communication training programs people learn to ask questions like this, for it is good to explore if your goals have been reached, but for that to happen you have to take charge of that exploration, not hoping that the other person somehow does it for you.

You might be interested in the 15th episode (of the 4th series) of Person of Interest, "Q & A" (Aired at February 17, 2015), in which depressed and addicted people were targeted with special adds to drive profit up. I won't spoil the whole episode, but it certainly made me think about our implicit, almost tacit trust in search engines, social media sites, and other services we don't fully understand (as users, because we don't have access to the source or data), but which we use daily. I can only imagine our dependence on these services to grow in the future, while our understanding of these complex systems does not grow at the same rate (or at all).

True. Although the more popular/populous museums tend to offer models you can interact with, whereas the smaller ones more often offer the real thing.

If you're ever offered to visit the archives/warehouse of a museum, accept. Showing (large) stuff is expensive in space, so most exhibitions are only the tip of the ice berg of the enormous amount of stuff the museum has collected and stored. Often an exhibition is a mix of well-known artifacts that visitors expect to be there (and are therefore included, but are not very interesting as you already know them), some artifacts that are good specimens over-all to show (but not necessarily that interesting), and some truly interesting pieces (you probably never have seen before). I found that when you visit the archive/warehouse of a museum, curators tend to show artifacts from that last category in particular.

I've been to a couple of these museums as well. What makes them fun to go to are:

- you may touch everything, often including things inside the computers itself

- the people working there (or, as is often the case, the one guy working there) is knowledgeable, willing to talk about it in depth, cares, and you can have a real conversation with them.

- there's a lot of surprising hardware around I had no idea existed (from failed computer companies, to specialized I/O of decades past, to special-purpose hardware)

You cannot get the same full experience with most regular museums, as then you have to follow their narrative instead of following your curiosity.

On the other hand, these museums are often not much more than an erudite collection of historical artifacts they got their hands on. To preserve is to select with a plan, not just collect everything.

I was more thinking about something like LyX and hide the typesetting engine / markup language for a while. Although when children have experience with an editor like this, supporting them to learn something like HTML (of LaTeX) is probably a lot easier as they understand the concept of structural elements.

Your example of MS Word is interesting. Not only are these "playable" features distracting, they don't help with learning to write non-trivial texts either. I'd like to see them use a simple semantical text editor where they indicate the structure of the text, which then is automatically formatted. Formatting then is not a seemingly integral part of writing anymore, but a separate task.

More importantly, I think, is that a lot of educators and parents seem to value "having fun" as an important characteristic of education. I am doing research on innovative mathematics education in primary school, and, when asking teachers to evaluate the lessons or instructional materials, they always point out how much fun the children had (compared to the usual instruction). If I asked further and inquire about the actual learning of the students, most teachers aren't able to express anything beyond the superficial, either related to class management or to regurgitating parts of the curriculum.

Yes, I come here to read up on programming, ICT, and the information society, but one of the things I like most about aggregation-type sites like hackernews, reddit, and slashdot is to be surprised about intriguing thing I had no idea existed.

If I imagine the internet usage of the visitors of hackernews as a enormous Venn diagram with each visitor his own circle, these type of articles allow me to look beyond the border of my own circle into the circles overlapping mine most, allowing me to expand my circle.

I almost always use the cards from either http://svg-cards.sourceforge.net/ or https://code.google.com/p/vectorized-playing-cards/; both are open source.

The terms cathedral/bazaar do have meaning in the community beyond the specific definition in that book. Worse, without some historical hesitation, using that specific definition now, 14 years later, is to ignore the influence of that book on the larger discourse on the topic. (Compare it to the Bible: interpreting it as is without taking into account the 2000+ years of history and cultural evolution is non-sense [although popular in certain circles])

I like to generate my presentations with the LaTeX package "beamer", offering well-typeset symbols, text, and figures (through Tikz) that all fit together nicely. It might not be flashy of hipster-y, but it certainly is different from you run off the mill powerpoint presentations.

I wonder if you can have a favorite e-book the same way you can have a favorite physical book? My favorite books I read multiple times, they have become worse for wear, I know every wrinkle I made while reading it, and, while reading it, it just feels right in my hands. I don't have that with e-books. Yes, the content is the same, but I am less able to form an attachment to a virtual copy than I am to a physical copy. Somehow, the holistic experience of reading a physical book versus reading an e-book on a e-book reader is different, although the actual content in both manifestations is the same. Maybe I am old-fashioned, but books and series I care about more, I still get physical copies. For my light reading, however, I'm fine with e-books.