208 karma · joined February 10, 2017
Uh when did you take it? When I took the self-paced version with Harvey we read SICP. I mean, I'm sure some students skipped readings but they were still assigned nevertheless.
I'm hoping The Mill folks can bring back attention to VLIW.
ARM/Power/MIPS/RISC-V are all examples of a reduced instruction set architecture, RISC.
People switched to Chrome because Google told you it was a better experience every time you made a search. I don't see how people of my parents generation (60s) will ever hear about Brave.
I actually wrote about it last week: http://tmccrmck.github.io//post/rust-optimization-partii/
Also, for anyone interested it looks like he just posted on HN for the first time under user 'worrydream'.
> It is not possible to measure the latency of a memory read or write instruction with software methods. It is only possible to measure the combined latency of a memory write followed by a memory read from the same address. What is measured here is not actually the cache access time, because in most cases the microprocessor is smart enough to make a "store forwarding" directly from the write unit to the read unit rather than waiting for the data to go to the cache and back again. The latency of this store forwarding process is arbitrarily divided into a write latency and a read latency in the tables. But in fact, the only value that makes sense to performance optimization is the sum of the write time and the read time.
I went back to my old high school a few years ago to see the AP Computer Science class and the difference in the students was marked to say the least.
movl $1, %esphttps://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/dat/miranda/wadler87....
[1] Many compilers have much more than two stages. For example, Rust has another intermediate representation called MIR.
2. I think you are focusing too much on the use of the word "nerd" here. Harvey chose the use of that word, not MIT.
One of my friends was able to skip 61a by meeting with the department chair, Paul Hilfinger, and convincing him that 61a would be a waste of time for him. My friend could drone on and on about the simplest of subjects so we assumed he just annoyed Hilfinger until he said "enough already".
Scheme levels the playing field. I have never encountered a student who entered university with years of functional programming experience and I was a TA for an introductory CS course. I think moving back to Scheme would be a wise choice for universities that are combating problems with diversity.
Brian Harvey explained the decision to switch here:
"But, as I keep saying, the choice of programming language isn't the main point. I get upset when students, even the students who like 61A, refer to it as "the Scheme course." It's not a course about Scheme! It's a course about programming paradigms. MIT, where SICP was written, no longer includes that course in its lower division core sequence, not because they wanted to change programming languages, but because they changed the entire sequence from courses organized around big groups of ideas to courses organized around application areas: first "let's build and program a robot" and then "let's build and program a cell phone." That's a brave and thoroughgoing attempt to, among other things, attract non-nerds to computer science. To say, as some people do here, "MIT switched from Scheme to Python" completely misses the point of what MIT did; nobody is proposing any change half as profound at Berkeley." [1]
Besides the occasional surprise that I don't have a Facebook when I meet someone it has never been a problem. Sometimes I don't know about events going on with friends but I inevitably learn if it's important.
Personally, I've always been most impressed by the research into formal verification: Z3, Dafny, TLA+, F*, Lean, and many more.
A common sentiment on the thread was that Microsoft Research was more akin to Bell Labs.
> I've always had the impression that MSR (Microsoft Research) was generally doing much more fundamental research than Google.