Punched Cards? Sheer Bloody Luxury

by Bill Wadge

And you try and tell the young people of today that … they won’t believe you!
– Monty Python, the Four Yorkshiremen

Yes, punched cards – that’s how I  learned to program.

In This Talk …

by Bill Wadge

Academics love to talk, talk, talk … and to give “talks”. I was no exception.

Sometimes they went well, sometimes not so well … and sometimes they went weird. Here are some outstanding ones in various categories.

Markup Macro Processor

by Bill Wadge

The Markup Macro Processor (MMP) is a text based macro system that uses a markup-like syntax, similar to (but much simpler than) XML.

Branching Time Iteration

By Bill Wadge

In the original Lucid language, the index domain (the set of natural numbers) was thought of as a set of time points-Lucid was designed as a temporal functional programming language.

Of course by choosing the set of natural numbers as the set of time points we are at the same time choosing a very simple model of time. In this model there is a first instant, and every instant has a unique successor. This is the bare minimum required to formulate conventional iterative constructs.

The intensional paradigm, however, has no commitment to any particular model of time or to any corresponding particular set of timepoints. This would suggest investigating temporal programming based on a different notion of time.

I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and dog-gone it, people like me. Writing grant applications

For two years I was on the Canadian NSERC committee that reviewed individual grant applications. Fascinating.

After reading dozens of applications you can begin to see patterns emerging. I’m going to review some of these  patterns, all but one of which I don’t recommend. No guarantees but I hope this helps.

The Secret of Academic Success – or fun filled failure if you prefer

In my research career I’ve discovered many things, including the secret of academic success (too late to help my own career). I’m  going to share the secret  with  you.

Map Reduce for Mortals

Suppose you want the sum of the squares of the  elements of a list congruent to 1 mod 3 you can write

reduce(lambda t,x t+x,map(square,filter(lambda x: x % 3 == 1,[1,2,3,4,5])))

Clear? As mud … (there are plenty of tutorials online about map, filter and reduce).