30 JUN 2013 by ideonexus

 The Epoch of Potential Memory

One can see Manovich’s argument becoming true in the development of database technology the 20th century. The first commercially available computer databases were organized hierarchically. If you wanted to get to a particular piece of information, you went to the overarching category and made a series of choices as this category broke down into groups then subgroups until you got to the specific piece of information that you required. This mode of traveling through a database was called “...
  1  notes

We live in a world where we can pull any aggregation of facts out of historical references to produce the aspects of history we wish to explore. It is dynamic and full of potential.

11 MAY 2013 by ideonexus

 Plato's Theory of Forms and Object Oriented Programming

In the theory of forms, Plato posits that there were these things called "forms," and a form is basically an abstract concept that represents some sort of object that exists. Then these objects were basically some sort of particular thing that has form-ness of some kind. So you can almost think of this as like a class and an instance basically, where you have the general definition and then the specific one. And then those objects also have attributes, which is some sort of quality. Whenever...
  2  notes

Plato's idea of forms and objects with that formness is very similar to the concept in OOP, with classes and objects.

01 JAN 2010 by ideonexus

 Fundamental Names in Computer Science

Consider some fundamental names: Turing (computation theory and programmable automata), von Neumann (computer architecture), Shannon (information theory), Knuth, Hoare, Dijkstra, and Wirth (programming theory and algorithmics), Feigenbaum and McCarthy (artificial intelligence), Codd (relational model of databases), Chen (entity-relationship model), Lamport (distributed systems), Zadeh (fuzzy logic), Meyer (object-oriented programming), Gamma (design patterns), Cerf (Internet), Berners-Lee (WW...
  1  notes

The author uses this list as proof that computer science can be an inductive discipline, but a list of successes is useless for this argument. All of these "fundamental names" are such because their theories were proven in the real world. It's a selective list. We need to see a list of all theorists and then gauge how well induction works versus empiricism.

It does make a good list of big names and their contributions.