Fractal Friday - Computer Science is broken

Joe Gregorio says that computer Science, at a deep and fundamental level, is broken. Nothing significant has happened for may years to move the state of the "science" forward.

I tend to agree. A lecturer of mine in college, in, oh what was it...1984 or so, used to say "nothing significant has happened since 1968". That was the year of Algol 68. I think he could make the same statement today.

Now I am more of an information-guy than an algorithmics-guy but I would be inclined to say that nothing significant has happened since the invention of the word processor.

Joe asks "where are the fractals"? I think they are in the documents. Headings and sub-headings to any depth with anything you like in between the headings, in any order. Self similar. Arbitrarily deep and fiendishly difficult to process automatically. That is the real world. A messy world of "unstructured" stuff that we call "content" lest we sully the word "data".

The un-real world is the so-much-simpler concept of tables and fields and scalar values...That is what is broken IMO. The science of computer science knows a lot about the theory of computation - it is a branch of math. But data...content...documents...well, I think we are still in diapers on that subject.

Pet Peeves - Unicode

Internationalization? Just use Unicode!

Right. Yup. That will fix it.

What's new in Python 3.0

What's new in Python 3.0. Of particular note to me is the significant reworking of the Unicode bits. In Python 3, Unicode is in from the ground floor up. This is as it needs to be. The only way to do Unicode - in all its complexity - well, is to do it from the ground up.

Implement first, design later

"Far from being anathema, the idea is a very powerful one, especially in information modelling. --
Implement first, design later

Pet Peeves - English

"To get these pesky, trumped up bundles of sand and sparks to do our bidding we must find ways of expressing, in languages like English - with as little ambiguity as possible - what goes it, what comes out and what goes on in between...--Pet Peeves - English

Open Source Considered Harmful

"It is hot in this kitchen and getting hotter all the time. What to do? Find a way to reduce the heat or leverage the latest asbestos suits? We are mostly doing the latter. -- Open Source Considered Harmful

Better regulation through software

"There is a lot of talk these days about regulation, especially the kind intended to control the activities of financial organizations. I have a big problem with regulation." -- Better regulation through software