Month: February 2020

Call for suggestions: beauty

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On April 29 in the early evening at the Schaffhausen Institute of Technology I will give a talk on “The Beauty of Software”, exploring examples of what makes some concepts, algorithms, data structures etc. produce a sense of esthetics. (Full abstract below.) I gave a first version at TOOLS last year but am revising and expanding the talk extensively.

I obviously have my own examples but am interested in more. If you have some that you feel should be considered for inclusion, perhaps because you experienced a “Wow!” effect when you encountered them, please tell me. I am only asking for names or general pointers, not an in-depth analysis (that’s my job). To avoid having my thunder stolen I would prefer that you alert me by email. I will give credit for examples not previously considered.

Thanks!

Abstract of the talk as published:

Scientists often cite the search for beauty as one of their primary guiding forces. Programming and software engineering offer an inexhaustible source of astoundingly beautiful ideas, from strikingly elegant algorithms and data structures to powerful principles of methodology and language design.

Defining beauty is elusive, but true beauty imposes itself in such a way as to remove any doubt. Drawing comparisons from art, literature and other endeavours. He will show a sample of ideas from all walks of software, directly understandable to a wide audience of non-software-experts, offering practical applications in technology that we use daily, and awe-inspiring in their simplicity and elegance.

An annoying practice from another age

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When you want to contact academic researchers, particularly computer scientists, you often find their email addresses on their Web pages in a mildly obfuscated form such as “albert dot einstein at princeton dot edu”.

If you try to copy-paste such a pseudo-address into an email client so as to fix it there, you often have to spend some time fighting the email client’s knowledge of what an email address looks like. It can result in errors and bounced mail. Not the world’s worst scandal but an annoying waste of time.

An address written out in that form is a way for the page owner to announce to the cognoscenti: “I am a computer scientist and hence very knowledgeable about the ways of the Internet; I know that spammers run bots to harvest addresses. See how I defeat them.”

So 1995!

Both spam and defenses against it are no longer what they were back then. Anyone who manages to use email effectively is protected, even without knowing it, by spam blockers, which have become quite good. (According to a specialized site, 14.5 billion spam emails are sent every day, so without these protections we would all be be drowning in spam, which for most people is not the case.)

As to any spam harvesters who are really interested in computer science researchers, they are most likely able anyway to write a little regular expression analyzer that captures the vast majority of the supposedly obfuscated addresses.

If you really want strangers to be able to email you without making your address visible to the spammers, and are a CS person, just include in your Web page a few lines of Javascript that, without revealing the email address in the HTML code, will display something like “Here is my email address”, in such a way that a visitor who clicks on Here gets a new-email window with your email address pre-filled. Not very hard — I use this trick on my own home page and am certainly not a Javascript expert.

But I suspect that  as long as you are prepared to let people email you, even just letting your email address appear in clear is not going to result in catastrophe. Your organization’s or ISP’s spam filter is protecting you.

Come on. This is 2020. Windows 95 and the OJ Simpson trial are no longer the news of the day.  Time to stop worrying about what no longer matters, and stop bothering people who are just trying to reach you.

Down with corny address obfuscation!

 

 

 

LASER 2020 in Elba Island: DevOps, Microservices and more, first week of June

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The page for the 2020 LASER summer school (31 May to 7 June) now has the basic elements (some additions still forthcoming) and registration at the early price is open. The topic is DevOps, Microservices and Software Development for the Age of the Web with both conceptual lectures and contributions from industry, by technology leaders from Amazon, Facebook and ServiceNow. The confirmed speakers are:

  • Fabio Casati, ServiceNow and University of Trento, and Kannan Govindarajan from ServiceNow on Taking AI from research to production – at scale.
  • Adrian Cockcroft, Amazon Web Services, on Building and Operating Modern Applications.
  • Elisabetta Di Nitto, Politecnico di Milano.
  • Valérie Issarny, INRIA, on The Web for the age of the IoT.
  • Erik Meijer, Facebook, on Software Development At Scale.
  • Me, on Software from beginning to end: a comprehensive method.

As always, the setup is the incomparable environment of the Hotel del Golfo in Procchio, Elba Island off the coast of Tuscany, ideal at that time of year (normally good weather, warm but not hot, few tourists). The school is intensive but there is time to enjoy the beach, the hotel’s amenities and the wonderful of environment of Elba (wake up your inner Napoleon). The school has a fairly small size and everyone lives under the same (beautiful) roof, so there is plenty of time for interaction with the speakers and other participants.

About these participants: the school is intended for engineers and managers in industry as well as researchers and PhD student. In fact it’s a mix that one doesn’t find that often, allowing for much cross-learning.

Another way to put it is that this is now the 16th edition of the school (it started in 2004 but we skipped one year), so it cannot be doing everything wrong.