My amazing wife and son both continue to produce fine and mighty work, and occasionally the world recognizes it’s splendiferous brilliance :-)

WeatherGrrrl has been heavily submitting her work to shows in the last year or so, and while she’s had good luck at places like WARM, her lot (like that of most artists) has been that of the rejection letter.

One happy bit of news this week, though, was the use of four of her pieces in the catalog for the Colorado Mesa University 4×6/6×4 Poscard Exhibit. It’s not a juried show (we think they accepted everything they were sent), but in the nice catalog book (available on Blurb) they featured the piece above in one of the “larger” images, which was a nice treat. (Her pieces are on pages 15 and 17 of the book in preview mode.)

You might also check out WeatherGrrrl’s post on this for more info.

StackSort connects to StackOverflow, searches for 'sort a list', and downloads and runs code snippets until the list is sorted.

Internet nerdom being fairly OCD, someone (Gregory Koberger) of course went and implemented this, and it works!

As Gregory says, this is potentially a security nightmare waiting to happen, so it’s not clear that you should actually run his code. Being a brave and foolish (and somewhat careful) soul, however, I’ve fallen on this sword so that you don’t have to, and I can confirm that it works. After trying several dozen StackOverflow pages (most of which yielded either “Could not extract a function to run” or “Contained potentially bad code”), it stumbled across a working version of Quicksort in JavaScript.

Ta Da!

The success of this approach, however, does suggest interesting things about how people approach certain kinds of problem solving these days. Where “old people” like me would have bought a book to learn something new, my students are much more prone to assemble a patchwork understanding from tons of Googling. While I think this often leads to a quite fragile and incomplete understanding of the topic at hand, it is often sufficient to get them through what is assigned. In other words, they’re very skilled at answering the question that was posed, which was itself often somewhat shallow because that’s what we all have time for. So while faculty would like to think that we’re creating experts (whatever that means) in certain topics, we rarely have the time to give them assignments and tasks that require a deep level of expertise.

In the land and time of books, we might have believed that everyone read and understood the 8 assigned chapters, but the assignments almost certainly didn’t strictly require that. In fact I’m willing to bet a whole lot skimming actually went on that was not so different from the Googling that happens now. The difference is that when I skimmed a book, there was a reasonably coherent thread connecting the dots that were touched on. “Skimming” the Internet, however, is a much less coherent experience. The authors, examples, and assumptions aren’t the same from search result to search result. Worse (in computing) the versions aren’t necessarily the same, so we often end up with inconsistent and downright contradictory results! A few years ago I taught a class that used Python 3, and it turned out that almost all Googling pointed us at Python 2 examples and answers, which lead to all manner of confusion amongst my students.

So call me old-fashioned, but I still like a book, even if it’s an e-book, when I’m learning something conceptually new, as I do really appreciate a coherent voice and structure. If I need to remind myself of a library function or piece of syntax, it’s to the Googles. If I’m learning something that’s very similar to something I already know, then I’m happy with on-line docs if they’re well written. If, however, I’m expanding my horizons in more significant ways, a book is still the thing.

It’s a true joy, and I’m really looking forward to being able to read the “finished” work. It’s a project oriented book, though, which means that to really learn from it we’re going to have to play along at home, programming, and experimenting, and analyzing. We’re all going to have to set aside some time for this when it does come out. But it’ll be worth it. And while the claim is that we’ll be learning about Generative Projects or Genetic Programming or whatever Bill decides to have GP stand for when he wraps this thing, we’re also going to learn a lot about software development and problem solving along the way, from someone who’s got a lot of great things to say on those important subjects. So we’d best buckle our seatbelts!

I do, however, have to take issue with a claim Bill makes in the introductory “About this book” section:

This is not a textbook. If your instructors try to use it as one, complain. If they argue, send them to me.

To be honest, it’s turning out a lot more like an anti-textbook. It will not improve your performance on tests. We’ll use “advanced” techniques before we discuss “basic” ones, ignore common practices to focus on more appropriate contingent solutions for specific problems, and may not even touch on techniques your instructors think you ought to know.

Remember, my goal is to support and extend your existing skills so you can productively explore further. Seek comprehensive knowledge and historical grounding in other books. They are full of it.

I can’t help but think he had me in mind when he wrote these lines, and I doubt he’ll be surprised to learn that I’m certainly seriously considering using it in my Evolutionary Computation and Artificial Intelligence course in the Spring. <snigger>

The issue, I suspect, is what one considers a “textbook” and what the point of such a thing is. Traditionally textbooks are big, fat things that provide a “coherent” overview of “everything you need to know about subject X”. I’ve got a bunch of these on my shelves with nice overviews of things like calculus and physics and chemistry. Old things, with a clear sense of what matters and what order it should be presented in.

In teaching computer science, however, things are typically much less clear. What’s “vital” in our field? What’s the “natural” or most pedagogically sensible order to present that material? There are lots of ideas out there, but hardly consensus. And that’s on the introductory material; my upper division electives usually focus on material where there’s even less agreement.

Starting in the late 90’s I started moving away from “traditional” textbooks when I could. I found that the most important part of most of my courses was process rather then content. Most computing textbooks I’ve seen are, unfortunately, much stronger on content than process. There are piles of books full of catalogues of algorithms, but they’re mostly presented like magic tricks, things Very Smart People dreamt up in some strange opium vision, inaccessible to the rest of us. The challenge in my experience is coming up with these visions, the process and the problem solving. So a book like Fowler’s wondrous Refactoring is far more educational in the long run, giving us skills for life instead of a box full of baubles.

The contrast between process and content has been made far more pronounced by the web and its many tools and collections. Young folks (and even this old guy) almost never reach for a book when they want to look something up; that’s what Google is for. The reference value of big encyclopedias of “facts” is greatly diminished when we can so easily find things on-line, but a well-written description of an important process is still a treasure.

Which brings us back to Bill’s book.

He claims it’s not a textbook because he doesn’t plan to cover “every” technique or concept or approach. He’s going to doing things in the “wrong” order. Foolishly, he’s not going to help improve our performance on tests, choosing to instead helping us develop skills that will help us for years to come.

Silly, silly man.

So, yeah, I do want to use Bill’s book in my class, and my students are more than welcome to complain to me or take it up with Bill. I doubt, however, that they will. The writing is opinionated and ornery and humble in all the right ways, and the emphasis on projects and problem solving are the sort of thing our students just eat up. I’m guessing that they’d happily line up behind something like this vs. a more traditional text.

As will I.

P.S. You should check out the book’s LeanPub site (https://leanpub.com/pragmaticGP) and sign up for notification. It’s a great way for people to help delude Bill into thinking that he’s not actually wasting his time.

Or something like that.

Actually, I helped a piece of Jess Larson’s wonderful art become the central component of a book cover, but let us not quibble.

As patient, long-time readers might know/remember, Jess Larson makes very cool art, including a fantastic series of girdles from several years back. There was a showing of her girdles at the PRCA back in 2006, and I had the chance to carefully photograph the show, posting many of the results on Flickr.

Zip ahead several years, and one of these photos caught the eye of the folks at Caketrain as they were looking for ideas for the cover of a new book they were publishing: Tongue party by Sarah Rose Etter. Some e-mails were traded, etc., etc., and Jess and I both happily agreed to have our work (her girdle, my photo of it) used for their cover.

One of the unexpected little treasures that was waiting for us when we got home from Arkansas this week was my copy of the book, and the cover (pictured above) is really wonderful. I love the texture they added as the background and the way they’ve incorporated the text. I haven’t actually read the thing yet, but the pre-press blurbs certainly sound wonderful and I look forward to adding it to my summer reading list!

Thanks to Jess for making such cool art, giving me such nifty things to take pictures of, and being generous about the use of her art in this new context. Thanks also to the kind folks at Caketrain for seeing the work and getting in touch, and for making such a cool cover out of it all. This is another neat example of the value of sharing work on-line with tools such as Flickr; without that none of this would have been possible. I’m not getting paid anything beyond my free copy of the book, but now a whole new set of people will see Jess’s art and my photography, and that’s quite fine in my humble opinion.