Results tagged “computing science” from SweetFriday

The article, "Trains, Elevators, and Computer Science", begins with a brief history of trains and elevators and specifically their braking systems. The writer, Dick Lipton, a computer science professor at Georgia Tech university, positions his article as practical by first stating that George Westinghouse was "not a theoretician, but was one of the great inventors of the 1800's", then fully explaining the braking problems and adding little comments such as "Pretty neat" and "extremely clever" after some engineering idea.

After 10 paragraphs of history we finally reach the point where Lipton explains the "general principle" behind both and the relation to computing science. This principle is

...do not rely on an action, but on the structure of the system. Make the default, a passive state, a safe state so that when the system fails, it gets to the safe state by default.

A few weeks ago I picked up the books A Discipline in Programming and Structured Programming. The first is by E. W. Dijkstra and the second includes a large section written by him. I became interested in these books after reading a few of Dijkstra's other papers and about Donald Knuth's great works. The computer science field could stand to have a bit more formalism in it and less hand-waving about "real-world" tools and methodologies.

Here are some quotes that I found especially good.