{"id":43,"date":"2008-11-02T17:33:35","date_gmt":"2008-11-02T22:33:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.knitbot.org\/blog\/2008\/11\/02\/computer-programming\/"},"modified":"2008-11-02T17:33:35","modified_gmt":"2008-11-02T22:33:35","slug":"computer-programming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.knitbot.org\/blog\/2008\/11\/02\/computer-programming\/","title":{"rendered":"Computer Programming"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Last night, I attended the Gala celebrating <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dcacm.org\/\">DC ACM<\/a>&#8216;s 50th Anniversary.&nbsp; It<br \/>\nwas a well-run affair, seemingly effective in its aim to pull together<br \/>\nvisibility, awareness and support for the re-emerging ACM chapter.<\/p>\n<p>The keynote speaker was <a href=\"http:\/\/www.research.att.com\/%7Ebs\/\">Bjarne<br \/>\nStroustrup<\/a>, best known as the designer of the C++ programming<br \/>\nlanguage.&nbsp; He gave a very interesting talk, unveiling the history<br \/>\nof C++ and some of the thinking behind its evolution, as well as<br \/>\npointing to the key updates in the now-finalized <a href=\"http:\/\/www.research.att.com\/%7Ebs\/rules.pdf\">C++0x<\/a> (likely<br \/>\nto be C++09).&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; I think some of the power of his<br \/>\npresentation came from the fact that he was articulate in sharing the<br \/>\nbacking story, instead of just pummelling the audience with sample<br \/>\ncode, feature lists, or other gee whiz factoids&nbsp; about C++ or<br \/>\nother programming languages.&nbsp; The slides (and a video of the<br \/>\npresentation) will be available on the DC ACM website, shortly.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, this tickled a few neurons in my own brain, and left me<br \/>\nthinking wistfully of programming days.&nbsp; While I always liked it,<br \/>\nit&#8217;s been a long, long time since I did any programming of note in any<br \/>\nlanguage.&nbsp; Long enough ago that object oriented programming was<br \/>\njust becoming mainstream, and I never got seriously into<br \/>\nit.&nbsp;&nbsp; The world of programming, and the tools to support it,<br \/>\nhave changed entirely.&nbsp; It&#8217;s hard to tell which new practices are<br \/>\nactually <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">de rigueur<\/span>, and<br \/>\nwhich ones are simply stylistic.&nbsp;&nbsp; <\/p>\n<p>However, I have no particular need for programming in my current line<br \/>\nof work, and certainly don&#8217;t have so much spare time that I want to<br \/>\nfill&nbsp; it by climbing up the learning curve again.&nbsp; There<br \/>\naren&#8217;t any simple things that need programming in my life &#8212; and<br \/>\nwriting a full-on knitting design program, say,&nbsp; using <a href=\"http:\/\/www.knitml.com\/blog\/\">KnitML<\/a>,&nbsp; is hardly a<br \/>\nsimple thing \ud83d\ude42&nbsp; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last night, I attended the Gala celebrating DC ACM&#8216;s 50th Anniversary.&nbsp; It was a well-run affair, seemingly effective in its aim to pull together visibility, awareness and support for the re-emerging ACM chapter. The keynote speaker was Bjarne Stroustrup, best &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.knitbot.org\/blog\/2008\/11\/02\/computer-programming\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-all","category-misc"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7dQdt-H","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.knitbot.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.knitbot.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.knitbot.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.knitbot.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.knitbot.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.knitbot.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.knitbot.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.knitbot.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.knitbot.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}