Recent Readings

Reading is fun. I read books anywhere anytime. I read books in my bed after waking up. The bus to the office is a good place to read. After getting off the bus, I usually walk 25 minutes with a book in my hand. HM said that reading while walking is dangerous. It's rather safe, however, because the campus in the early morning has few people walking and I usually enjoy reading while working. The moment before sleeping is also good time and a good place to read. HM always says that I should turn off the light to get a good sleep. But for reading habit, I left the light turned on all night and got complaints many times.

Recently I've read the following books.

To Kill a Mockingbird (앵무새죽이기) Harper Lee

The real reason for choosing this book is that I've recently bought a puzzle book named "To Mock a Mockingbird." But I've known that this book is a famous one. I've passed the first half of this book just now. I've got a silent and tranquil mood. Modest good.

잔잔한 이야기. 그러나 졸리지는 않다.

The Catcher in the Rye (호밀밭의 파수꾼) J. D. Salinger

This is a famous book. I thought I got the message of the author... but not impressive. Maybe I may have gotten too old for this book.

많은 사람들이 평하듯 위선과 그에대한 참을 수 없음에 대한 책. 이십년전에 읽었다면 인생이 바뀌었을까?

The Myths of Innovation Scott Berkun

Some reviewer said that Scott is mere former Microsoft employee and there are no evidence that he actually understands about innovation. However, I'm certain that many old sages, philosophers had been underestimated for the same reason. His writing is very witty and deep.

Though he may or may not be a sage, this book is worth reading. 5/5

저자가 입만 살았다고 평가받을수도 있겠지만 잘 읽히고 여운이 남는 좋은 책. 입만 살았다고 누가 평가할 때 '그래?'하고 털털 털고 일어나 무엇인가를 보여준다면 더 좋을 수도 있겠으나 사상가는 굳이 그럴 필요도 없다.

그러나 나는 이제 뭔가 보여주고 싶다. 허생전의 허생처럼.

선인들의 공부법 (The road to enlightenment) 박희병 편역(Editor: Park Hee Byoung)

All genii are mere human, like you and I. If you accept this fact you can get a benefit from studying oldies.

성리학, 유학 자체는 낡은 것일 수 있지만 학문을 하는 사람들 자체는 옛사람이나 현대 사람이나 같다. 그것을 유념하고 이 책을 읽었더니 머리에 종소리가 많이 쳤다.

동숭동 그여자 (Misery in Dongsung-dong) 김동선

This book is similar to Misery by Stephen King. I've enjoyed this reading.

집착에 대한 이야기로, 대학시절 읽고 즐겼던 소설. 한 번 더 꺼내어 읽어보았다. 나와는 달리 많은 사람들한테 읽히지는 못했는지 이제는 절판되었다. 사실 호밀밭의 파수꾼이든 동숭동 그여자든 다를 점이 뭐가 있겠는가!

▶◀ He died.

Our former president Noh Mu Hyun died. He jumped from the high cliff, called Owl Rock.
When I was a child, another former president Park Jung Hee died. He got a shot.
I was not sad then. I was just frightened. because I didn't know anything.

I am not frightened now. I am sad.
I am sad that one of our national leader died.
I am sad that a man, who like to smile, died.
However, I am so sad that I don't know anything after growing up.

May my deepest sympathy reach you, Mr. Noh.

Blogging again

연휴와 회사 공사관계로 인해 블로깅도 잠시 쉬었었다. 이제 다시 일상이 돌아왔으니 블로깅도 재개한다. 오늘 본 내용중 프로그래밍 언어의 역사에 대한, 웃기지만 통렬한 글이 있어 전재한다. 원본은 여기에서 볼 수 있다.


A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages
1801 - Joseph Marie Jacquard uses punch cards to instruct a loom to weave "hello, world" into a tapestry. Redditers of the time are not impressed due to the lack of tail call recursion, concurrency, or proper capitalization.
1842 - Ada Lovelace writes the first program. She is hampered in her efforts by the minor inconvenience that she doesn't have any actual computers to run her code. Enterprise architects will later relearn her techniques in order to program in UML.
1936 - Alan Turing invents every programming language that will ever be but is shanghaied by British Intelligence to be 007 before he can patent them.
1936 - Alonzo Church also invents every language that will ever be but does it better. His lambda calculus is ignored because it is insufficiently C-like. This criticism occurs in spite of the fact that C has not yet been invented.
1940s - Various "computers" are "programmed" using direct wiring and switches. Engineers do this in order to avoid the tabs vs spaces debate.
1957 - John Backus and IBM create FORTRAN. There's nothing funny about IBM or FORTRAN. It is a syntax error to write FORTRAN while not wearing a blue tie.
1958 - John McCarthy and Paul Graham invent LISP. Due to high costs caused by a post-war depletion of the strategic parentheses reserve LISP never becomes popular[1]. In spite of its lack of popularity, LISP (now "Lisp" or sometimes "Arc") remains an influential language in "key algorithmic techniques such as recursion and condescension"[2].
1959 - After losing a bet with L. Ron Hubbard, Grace Hopper and several other sadists invent the Capitalization Of Boilerplate Oriented Language (COBOL) . Years later, in a misguided and sexist retaliation against Adm. Hopper's COBOL work, Ruby conferences frequently feature misogynistic material.
1964 - John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz create BASIC, an unstructured programming language for non-computer scientists.
1965 - Kemeny and Kurtz go to 1964.
1970 - Guy Steele and Gerald Sussman create Scheme. Their work leads to a series of "Lambda the Ultimate" papers culminating in "Lambda the Ultimate Kitchen Utensil." This paper becomes the basis for a long running, but ultimately unsuccessful run of late night infomercials. Lambdas are relegated to relative obscurity until Java makes them popular by not having them.
1970 - Niklaus Wirth creates Pascal, a procedural language. Critics immediately denounce Pascal because it uses "x := x + y" syntax instead of the more familiar C-like "x = x + y". This criticism happens in spite of the fact that C has not yet been invented.
1972 - Dennis Ritchie invents a powerful gun that shoots both forward and backward simultaneously. Not satisfied with the number of deaths and permanent maimings from that invention he invents C and Unix.
1972 - Alain Colmerauer designs the logic language Prolog. His goal is to create a language with the intelligence of a two year old. He proves he has reached his goal by showing a Prolog session that says "No." to every query.
1973 - Robin Milner creates ML, a language based on the M&M type theory. ML begets SML which has a formally specified semantics. When asked for a formal semantics of the formal semantics Milner's head explodes. Other well known languages in the ML family include OCaml, F#, and Visual Basic.
1980 - Alan Kay creates Smalltalk and invents the term "object oriented." When asked what that means he replies, "Smalltalk programs are just objects." When asked what objects are made of he replies, "objects." When asked again he says "look, it's all objects all the way down. Until you reach turtles."
1983 - Bjarne Stroustrup bolts everything he's ever heard of onto C to create C++. The resulting language is so complex that programs must be sent to the future to be compiled by the Skynet artificial intelligence. Build times suffer. Skynet's motives for performing the service remain unclear but spokespeople from the future say "there is nothing to be concerned about, baby," in an Austrian accented monotones. There is some speculation that Skynet is nothing more than a pretentious buffer overrun.
1986 - Brad Cox and Tom Love create Objective-C, announcing "this language has all the memory safety of C combined with all the blazing speed of Smalltalk." Modern historians suspect the two were dyslexic.
1987 - Larry Wall falls asleep and hits Larry Wall's forehead on the keyboard. Upon waking Larry Wall decides that the string of characters on Larry Wall's monitor isn't random but an example program in a programming language that God wants His prophet, Larry Wall, to design. Perl is born.
1990 - A committee formed by Simon Peyton-Jones, Paul Hudak, Philip Wadler, Ashton Kutcher, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals creates Haskell, a pure, non-strict, functional language. Haskell gets some resistance due to the complexity of using monads to control side effects. Wadler tries to appease critics by explaining that "a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?"
1991 - Dutch programmer Guido van Rossum travels to Argentina for a mysterious operation. He returns with a large cranial scar, invents Python, is declared Dictator for Life by legions of followers, and announces to the world that "There Is Only One Way to Do It." Poland becomes nervous.
1995 - Yukihiro "Mad Matz" Matsumoto creates Ruby to avert some vaguely unspecified apocalypse that will leave Australia a desert run by mohawked warriors and Tina Turner. The language is later renamed Ruby on Rails by its real inventor, David Heinemeier Hansson. [The bit about Matsumoto inventing a language called Ruby never happened and better be removed in the next revision of this article - DHH].
1995 - Brendan Eich reads up on every mistake ever made in designing a programming language, invents a few more, and creates LiveScript. Later, in an effort to cash in on the popularity of Java the language is renamed JavaScript. Later still, in an effort to cash in on the popularity of skin diseases the language is renamed ECMAScript.
1996 - James Gosling invents Java. Java is a relatively verbose, garbage collected, class based, statically typed, single dispatch, object oriented language with single implementation inheritance and multiple interface inheritance. Sun loudly heralds Java's novelty.
2001 - Anders Hejlsberg invents C#. C# is a relatively verbose, garbage collected, class based, statically typed, single dispatch, object oriented language with single implementation inheritance and multiple interface inheritance. Microsoft loudly heralds C#'s novelty.
2003 - A drunken Martin Odersky sees a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup ad featuring somebody's peanut butter getting on somebody else's chocolate and has an idea. He creates Scala, a language that unifies constructs from both object oriented and functional languages. This pisses off both groups and each promptly declares jihad.
Footnotes
Fortunately for computer science the supply of curly braces and angle brackets remains high.
Catch as catch can - Verity Stob

Recent Readings

I've read four books recently. All those were so-so.



ナマケモノはどこへ行く? アウグスト本田
(Korean Title: 나무늘보는 변할 수 있을까)
그냥 그런 우화..이지만 자신이 스스로 하는 선택이 중요하다라는 점에서 아래 책과 어떻게 보면 같은 수준이라고 볼 수 있다.

Mastering Self-Leadership: Empowering Yourself for Personal Excellence (Korean Title: 바보들은 항상 최선을 다했다고 말한다) Charles C. Manz Christopher P. Neck

아마존에서의 높은 별점과 서평등에 의해 큰 기대를 가지고 보았으나 최근 읽은 놀라운 자기계발서적들과 비교하면 그다지 우수하지 않은 책이다. 두어군데 정도 기억할 곳이 있어서 접어 놓았으나 (글을 쓰는 지금은 기억나지 않는다) 봐도 그만 안봐도 그만이라고 생각한다.

L'Arbre des possibles et autres histoires (나무) Bernard Werber

HM이 사 놓았던 베르나르 베르베르. Geek 작가라고 하면 아마 딱 맞을 것이다. 생긴것도 그렇게 생겼다. 이 책은 단편집인데, 아이작 아시모프에 비해 더 나을것도 없다. 다만 장편들을 서술할 때는 기존 SF소설가들보다는 나은 글쟁이인것 같으나 전문 소설가라고 보기에는 좀 뭔가... 약하다. 원서만의 묘미가 있을지는 몰라도, 베르베르의 책은 그냥 타임 킬링용. 단지 이 단편집을 펴내게 된 이유가 글을 빠르게 쓰는 훈련을 하기 위하여 매일 한시간씩 글 하나를 쓰는 훈련을 했다고 하는데, 소설가도 저런 특훈(?)을 하는구나 하고 감탄했고, 나도 기회가 되면 그리해보자 라는 생각의 메모를 해놓는 것이다.

L'Ultime secret (뇌) Bernard Werber

역시 베르베르는 일류작가라고 하기에는 많이 부족하다. 끝.