Re: Schneier, Data and Goliath: no hope for privacy

Salvador Mirzo <smirzo@example.com> wrote:

Rich <rich@example.invalid> writes:
 

Scott Dorsey <kludge@panix.com> wrote:

In article <vpo4uc$2omvt$1@dont-email.me>, Rich  <rich@example.invalid> wrote:

I had (if memory serves) at least one Pascal class, one Fortran class,
and an assembler (CDC Cyber 7000 - a really weird CPU on the inside)
class, all required classes for Engineering.  Pascal class was trivial
(had already done plenty of UCSD Pascal on Apple II in high-school) so
just had to adjust to the small difference in the CDC Cyber Pascal we
were using.  Fortran was similarly trivial, but oh did I come to hate
Fortran in the end.  Just had to learn the "fortranisms", as I already
understood the over-arching "how to program" aspects.  The assembler
class was also itself trivial (had done loads of 6502 assembler by this
point, and some 8086 assembler, provided one considered DOS's debug an
'assembler' of sorts).  Just had to "learn the language" rather than
the "how to program" part.

 
That's pretty unusual.  The reason why Fortran is a good thing is because
engineers can't be trusted with pointers.

>
There might be that.  I was there before the rise of C as the "be all"
language, which is how I had the Pascal and Fortran classes.  Five
years later and it was all C.
>

And COMPASS?  That's a very very strange assembler to teach....

>
It was the timeshare system the university had for students.  They had
a Cyber 7600 and a Cyber 8600, I only ever had accounts on the 7600. 
But since it was the system they used, Compass (I'd forgotten that
name, but that was it) was the assembler.
>

I went to gatech which had Cyber machines which the CS folks avoided
like the plague.  COMPASS is not exactly a normal assembler and has a
lot of fast-float-performance craziness...  it is not something I'd
really teach anyone whom I was trying to teach about the principles
of computing or how systems work.

>
Well, the assembly class did come after two semesters of the other
languages, and it did begin by presuming you "knew how to program" in
the general sense.  But yes, indeed, a weird CPU and assembler as
compared to other microprocessors that I was used to at the time.
>

And the PPUs code?  That's worse than IBM channel controller stuff. 
I'm sorry you had to do that.  --scott

>
Thankfully they didn't expect us to make use of the PPU stuff.  They
just had us essentially cause an abort and effectively a Cyber core
dump and that was what we turned in for our "execution runs", with
circles around the hex (or was it octal?) digits in the dump that were
the "answers".  I didn't question the "logic" of it, I just turned in
what they wanted to see.  And although a 'weird' CPU to program,
actually making the code perform whatever the assigned task they wanted
wasn't hard, provided one knew how to program in the first place.

 
Correct me if I'm wrong, but despite all the idiosyncrasy of the tools
and equipment you worked with, I would say---as it seems pretty clear
from your very posts here---that the educational opportunities you got
did their job pretty well. 

Yes, that is a correct statement. 

And the fact that you had to know how to program is still an unsolved
problem today, not any failure from the institution you were at the
time.

Yes, very much indeed.  And I wasn't saying so to downplay the
university.  The courses had prerequisites, you *were* presumed to have
the necessary prerequisites before starting the current course, which
is as it should be.  And, indeed, for those of us who entered the
course with the proper prerequisite knowledge, the actual course was
not in and of itself difficult.  One had to adjust to the new
idiosyncrasies of the 'thing' used by that course, but that's just true
for everything.

When I look at almost any programming textbook, I see the problem
is still open.  Perhaps the book
 
  How to Design Programs
  Matthias Felleisen, Robert Bruce Findler,
  Matthew Flatt and Shriram Krishnamurthi
  MIT Press, 2014, URL https://htdp.org
 
is the only meaningful candidate to a solution---as far as I have
looked.

Am not familiar with this book, but I do agree with your assessment
that the problem is still open (and, honestly, may just be getting
worse for newer students).  By far too many "programming" classes
amount to "learn the nouns and verbs of language X plus learn the 'word
ordering' for that language X".  But they simply don't touch on the
underlying concept of "how to program".  Which is quite a different
problem from "how to express known algorithm X in language Y", which is
what far too many programming classes turn into.  The fact that most
programming classes are the equivalent of "how to use msword to format
an already written book" vs.  "how to actually write a new never before
written novel" is a big part of the problem.