Re: debate: to get a Master's Degree in CS or Not

Randy wrote:
> :-) Depends on who you ask. Language theorists will talk the issue to
> death. Me? I think its beauty is in the eye of the beholder. CS types
> are often mesmerized by the number and "power" of a language's features.
> I think C++ is phenomenally ugly, confused, and counterproductive.

Actually CS types (meaning Computer Scientists, not programmers or
software engineers) are (or should be) well-versed in Kolomogorov
complexity theory in which it is made clear that all languages
possessing certain basic features are equivalent.

By "equivalent" is not meant the somewhat lame notion of equivalence
that everybody and their brother bandies about ("can compute the same
things"), but the more stringent sense of "expresses programs of the
same size for the same things".

The precise result is that in any two language, a given process can be
written by a program of the same size, plus or minus a fixed constant
that is generally not particularly large and dependent only the
languages being compared, not the task -- as long as the languages
embody Turing computability.

This number is none other than the Kolomogorov complexity of the
process and is a characteristic of the process, not the language it is
represented in.

For that reason, a CS type really doesn't give a damn what language is
used, as long as it's at Chomsky Type 0, since everything will be the
same size (equal to its Kolomogorov complexity), give or take, no
matter which language it is written in.

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: CollabRx seeks brilliant engineers for an excellent e-science adventure
    ... belief that lisp programmers are smarter/better. ... Java or PHP programmers. ... a type of language that attracts a personality that meets my perceptions ...
    (comp.lang.lisp)
  • Re: Question concerning object-oriented programming
    ... programming language, not his. ... there has usually been a toString. ... I know it's "unrealistic" to expect actual programmers to do this, ... tell me what a dog is. ...
    (comp.programming)
  • Re: Does Python really follow its philosophy of "Readability counts"?
    ... with enforcing that "shouldn't" in the language itself? ... In Python, direct access to pointers is a MUST NOT. ... where you are allowed to mess with the implementation. ... human assembly language programmers? ...
    (comp.lang.python)
  • Re: FORTH levels
    ... Most working on a collaborative project do not choose the programming language they are using: it is thrust upon them by the needs of the collaboration. ... When Iverson and Hui came up with J-- in part to remove APL's special character set and make it more "user friendly" not much of a community formed around it. ... And people who are by not by any reasonable stretch of the term "programmers" seem to take to Perl. ... But RPN does not require a visible stack, any more than any language requires a visible stack to rebuild its semantic trees from its flat expression. ...
    (comp.lang.forth)
  • Re: Why do some people hate java?
    ... programming language like Java to exist, or if Java must exists, there's ... The majority of programmers at the time were using C++, ... and other resources that are just as important to ...
    (comp.lang.java.programmer)