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John Horton Conway, mathematician and inventor of Conway's Game of Life has been reported by a colleague to have died from COVID-19 at the age of 82. Conway's death has also been reported (in Italian) by the Italian website "MaddMaths!".
From Wikipedia:
The Game of Life, also known simply as Life, is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. The game is a zero-player game, meaning that its evolution is determined by its initial state, requiring no further input. One interacts with the Game of Life by creating an initial configuration and observing how it evolves. It is Turing complete and can simulate a universal constructor or any other Turing machine.
Many different types of patterns occur in the Game of Life, which are classified according to their behaviour. Common pattern types include: still lifes, which do not change from one generation to the next; oscillators, which return to their initial state after a finite number of generations; and spaceships, which translate themselves across the grid.
Rest In Peace, John.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Sunday April 12 2020, @07:43PM (4 children)
There is something to be said for writing a simple exercise for yourself. Doing your own work. Especially in a new language.
My favorite new language exercises tend to do with prime numbers, and mandelbrot set generation. Even if the mandelbrot output is in ASCII grayscale.
Does the language have good data structures? GC? Lazy evaluation? Iterators? Yield? What kind of GUI output capabilities, if any? Does it have large integer arithmetic? Bonus points if it has something like Java's BigDecimal.
Do your own homework. Exams should be on a mobius strip. Stop. Put your pencils down. Turn your exam paper over.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 3, Touché) by gawdonblue on Sunday April 12 2020, @10:23PM (3 children)
Java is the new COBOL :)
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday April 13 2020, @04:07PM (2 children)
I believe Java is the new COBOL in the specific sense that it won't go away any time soon because of the vast investment in software written in it.
While Java had been having nice upgrades at a slow pace, in the last few years Java upgrades have become much larger in vision and at a faster pace. So I think Java is unlike COBOL in the sense of being lost in time. One evidence of that is that it is still in the top 1 or 2 of programming languages. eg, it's where the jobs are. It's not like COBOL where you almost cannot find anyone left alive that knows it. With the recent and planned changes to the language, I expect it to stay relevant for some time.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday April 14 2020, @11:56AM (1 child)
The downside of that is that old Java programs start to fail on new Java implementations.
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday April 14 2020, @03:25PM
They have been very careful to avoid that. I have not had that problem in practice. But I have heard of others who have. That said, I don't believe it is anything near the scale of problem that the Python 2 to Python 3 change was.
One big change is modules. You can largely ignore it unless your system is big enough that you want to take advantage of it.
Another is deprecated features. There is plenty of warning. Your third party library dependencies are the most likely thing to bite you. Example: JasperReports, this uses Groovy (language), which depends on a deprecated feature. Upgraded to Groovy 2.5.10, but still waiting on 3.0 for the real fix. I keep my eye on these kind of problems for my project. Looking just now, it looks like Groovy 3 might be ready for me to do some tasting.
Even on mainframes, which are legendary for their backward compatibility, there is still the saying (Devil's DP Dictionary) (from the song) . . .
I promised my love an upgrade with no cryin'
. . . .
I lied about the upgrade with no cryin'.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.