thirdbIT

Tuesday night we went to the boston ruby group which was having a presentation on Hackety Hack. We took Aya (five month old) with us. The place was packed. Someone gave up his Aeron chair so I could sit down with the baby, and then I turned around and saw I was sitting right in front of a guy I went to college with and haven’t seen since the turn of the millennium. So that was pretty fun. Brian DeLacey introduced the project, Kevin Driscoll told us all about the joys of teaching CS to high school students, and Eric Mill showed us how we could use Hackety Hack to view Youtube video of a guy catching a pair of glasses with his face. A kitty burrito photo was also involved, but that was not Eric’s fault.

After the break Brian Guthrie gave a presentation about Handshake, which I wish we could have stayed for. Design-by-contract is one of those things we feel we should know more about, like aspects. But Aya started looking restless, and since she’d been quiet for an hour and a half, we thought we’d better not press our luck. So we left and went to Toscanini’sfor ice cream. (I am sorry to say I believe Toscanini’s ice cream has declined in quality. I used to think it was some of the best ice cream in the world. But last night it seemed a bit gummy and muted in flavor. And expensive. )

When we got home, Aya decided to do some coding on her own, based on what she’d learned about Hackety Hack.

There were more women at the meeting than I’d been led to expect I might see. At least five, I’d say. And everyone seemed perfectly nice about the baby. I hope we get the chance to go again soon, without the baby. Maybe Max and I will take turns going.

Sometimes Max worries that he must not be naturally technical because he always hated his math classes, and his brother and his father are both brilliant math people. ( I have a powerful memory of sitting in the garden on a brilliantly sunny day, idly reading a book, while my father-in-law sat next to me and worked through some multivariable calculus problems for the fun of it.) Max is not as bad at math as he insists on believing, but I also don’t think math really has much to do with run-of-the-mill software development. Sure, it’s helpful to know when a problem you’re working on can’t be solved by a brute force algorithm because it’s mathematically ridiculous, but not everyone is writing algorithms.

Anyway, here’s my new favorite person (well, Al Gore still comes first), _why, on his new supercool programming learning tool for kids, and why he doesn’t start his programming lessons with math.

Obviously there is a ton of math in a ton of different kinds of programming. But you can be a great, successful software developer and never get deeper into math than knowing that floats don’t come out of the database exactly the same as they went in. (No, we don’t quite get why either.. But we know not to use floats in situations where you’d like things to add up the same every time you add them. And we know it without ever having written our own compilers. Does this mean we aren’t hard-core? Then so be it. What’s wrong with a little airbrushing, anyway?