Computer simulation, programming, software, technology, research, and more (since 2007)
I recently asked myself the question of just how many Powerpoint files I had on my work laptop and on my home machines. It turns out that it was pretty easy to figure that out using Windows Powershell, with some commands I found on a random website.
Continue reading “Counting Powerpoint Files, Checking Attributes, etc., on Windows 10”
In the July 2008 issue of IEEE Computer, there is short article called “In Praise of Scripting: Real Programming Pragmatism“, by Ronald P. Loui, a professor at Washington University (WUSTL). The article deals with the issue of what is the appropriate first language to teach new CS (Computer Science) students, and considers that a “scripting” langauge like Python or Ruby might be way better than Java (no doubt about that I think).
The interesting material in the article is the background on WHY he thinks that this is the case. He points to the immense popularity and rise of scripting in much of computing land. In the past ten years, it is clear to him (and I would agree with this too mostly) that languages like Perl, PHP, Awk, Ruby, JavaScript, and Python have eclipse Java and C++ as the most interesting and important programming languages for many practical tasks. Especially for web applications, where Java seems to have a presence but noone would dream of using something as clunky and impractical as C.
What can this teach us for the purpose of simulation and the creation of models of computer system hardware for the purpose of simulation? Maybe a fair bit…
Continue reading “In Praise of Scripting: Something for Modeling as Well?”