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  • >> Sean: Arno says "Could you say 'hello world' for us? >> BWK: hello world >> Sean: Fantastic!

  • >> Sean: [reading out a viewer question] Did the dominant linguistic theories of the time consciously or unconsciously

  • influence the design of certain programming languages? >> BWK: I suspect the

  • answer is 'yes' in some ways. I'm not sure that I'm enough of a historian to know

  • for sure, but for example languages like C derived from languages like, in

  • particular BCPL, which of course were influenced - sometimes positively,

  • sometimes in a sort of reactionary way to Algol, which was really really

  • fundamental. But also Fortran, which was, I would say, less theoretical in every

  • respect but very much more pragmatic in a way. So things are influenced by what

  • went before and sometimes it's: "Wow we need more of

  • that!", and sometimes it's "... Hmmm, we need less of that", and do something different. So

  • those would be examples. C++ would be another one, influenced by the wonderful

  • engineering that went into C -- efficiency, obvious mechanisms, and so on, but at the

  • same time taking what came from Simula, the idea of classes in particular. Simula

  • is a language that, I think, didn't get the recognition that it [deserved]. When Nygaard

  • got the Turing award for it, that was recognition, finally. But C++ [was] clearly

  • influenced by those two streams coming together. More modern example: Go, which

  • the pragmatic part of it, the syntax, the minimalism and so on very strongly

  • influenced by C, but on the other side the module structure influenced by all

  • of the things that came from Algol through [Ni]klaus Wirth -- Modula, Pascal,

  • Modula, Oberon, all of those things. And then the 'communicating sequential

  • processes' work of Tony Hoare. So those three streams come together and

  • certainly Tony Hoare's view of this was, let's call it a theoretical approach. So

  • all of these things come together. So, it's not like things come full-blown

  • from the head of Zeus. They are based on what has gone before. >> Sean: I've got a few

  • people saying just pass on thank you. So, thank you! >> BWK: Thank you all

  • >> Sean: What are your thoughts on writing 'secured by design' software in C today?

  • Is it better, as a result, for inexperienced programmers to use something

  • higher level - something else? >> BWK: I think writing secure software you should do it

  • by design. If you don't [i.e.] glue it on afterwards -- that won't work. You have to

  • think very carefully about what you do. I think the problem with C is that the

  • language itself doesn't provide you with many mechanisms for making sure that

  • your code is secure. So, there's lots of ways in which you can inadvertently make

  • a mistake and the compiler is not able to help you. And so for many purposes, a

  • higher-level language would probably be wiser because some of them may offer -- array

  • overflow is an obvious example. buffer overrun is one of the common

  • things that goes wrong with C programs. It doesn't go wrong, at least in that

  • sense, with any language which is manipulating strings or arrays for you,

  • in keeping track of the bounds of them. So, it's possible to screw up in any

  • language - absolutely - but I think C is by design a very, very sharp tool. And you

  • can cut yourself as well as cutting through things. >> Sean: Tabs or spaces? >> BWK: Tabs or spaces.

  • I started out with tabs because that's the way that UNIX was done. Ken

  • Thompson and Dennis Ritchie used tabs, everybody used tabs, there was no notion

  • of spaces, and this was partly the minimalism -- why type 4 characters

  • when you could type one? But the problem is that things tend to get wide after a

  • while, and especially in a language like Java which is intrinsically wide.

  • I think spaces are a better fit for most people, and so I think now, when I'm

  • writing my own code, I mostly use spaces and every once in a while I get bitten

  • because there's a tab when there should have been a space, or vice versa. Some

  • languages, in particular Go, enforce a standard format, period. And the standard

  • format uses tabs, and that's it. But you can display the tabs as any

  • number of spaces, so that the visual effect is right.

  • >> Sean: "Sinful [Citrus]" would like to know what you're involved in now? Innovations or

  • recreational ... Comp Sci? >> BWK: I'm glad you qualify it because

  • recreational, my wife and I are on vacation in England and having a

  • wonderful time, thank you. Technically, at the moment I am

  • trying to gear up for a class in the fall, where I'm going back after a several year

  • layoff to the class that I've been teaching for non-technical people. And I did

  • that for a long time, probably fifteen years or more. I can put in a plug for

  • the book, called "Understanding the Digital World"; please buy many copies for

  • yourself and your friends (!) But I had a three year layoff on that and so I'm

  • back to doing that in the fall. And of course the world changes and so there

  • are things that I didn't cover properly, I think, or enough, in previous go-arounds

  • that I want to include this time. The obvious things are things related to

  • machine learning, big data, natural language processing, and so what is

  • all of that stuff? How do you explain that for people who are not technical

  • but are probably going to be making decisions on behalf of those who are

  • technical? And so on. That's one of the things that I'm worrying about at the

  • moment. The other thing that I've been playing with off and on, really as a

  • dilettante, is issues in and around the digital humanities. We had talked earlier

  • about how computing spreads into lots and lots of different areas. So digital

  • humanities is basically doing with [a] computer the kinds of things of

  • analyzing data and drawing inferences from it and making it available to other

  • people and so on that you do with any other kind of data. But the data comes

  • from really, really interesting sources, often somewhat elderly. This goes back to

  • my interest in history. And so I have been over the last couple of years, I had

  • run computer science seminars, that is, seminars for computer science students

  • who are doing independent work in digital humanities, studying datasets

  • from all kinds of weird things. And I'm in addition supervising independent work --

  • one semester and senior thesis work -- for undergraduates on digital humanities. And

  • so I keep going on that, but very much as a dilettante. I could talk for a long time

  • about it but it would become obvious that I didn't

  • what I was talking about. So that would be fine and so that's another aspect. And

  • of course the same kinds of things about machine learning and natural language

  • processing and so on show up very much in digital humanities. There's a wonderful

  • thing here in England. It's called oldbaileyonline.org and

  • it's basically some university consortium, I guess, digitized all of the

  • records of the Old Bailey from the late 1600s until the early 1900s.

  • These had been court records, right; transcriptions had been taken from, as I

  • say, the late 1600s right into the early 1900s and they were all digitized, put

  • together in XML format, and now you can search them and find out things like,

  • well there was probably some guy named Sean Riley in the 1700s who was hanged

  • for stealing a pig, or something like that. It's just absolutely a wonderful

  • amazing database. It's close to two hundred thousand cases, very carefully

  • documented with the names of the perp[etrator]s and the victims and the witnesses and the

  • judges, and the what happened to the people when they were convicted? One

  • of the things I had not realized until I saw this was -- you've heard of transportation --

  • you know if you had been, if you'd done something bad, you were transported and

  • of course everybody thinks transportation meant Australia. No.

  • Transportation before 1776 meant you were shipped off to the United States, which

  • wasn't the United States at that point; it was just the colonies. And that might

  • explain all kinds of things.

>> Sean: Arno says "Could you say 'hello world' for us? >> BWK: hello world >> Sean: Fantastic!

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