Human-Nets-Request%rutgers@brl-bmd.UUCP (08/01/83)
HUMAN-NETS Digest Sunday, 31 Jul 1983 Volume 6 : Issue 40
Today's Topics:
Computers and Peole - Personal Information Systems (2 msgs) &
Worth of Technology (2 msgs) &
Secretaries and Managers,
Programming - Debugger Query: Summary of Replies
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Date: 27 July 1983 20:22 EDT
From: Robert Elton Maas <REM @ MIT-MC>
Subject: "You will be asked to leave the future immediately." -
Subject: illiteracy
The first that public terminals have to do is entice random passersby
and then teach them how to use the system. Part of this will be
teaching illiterates how to do some primitive reading. Perhaps
cartoons and icons can be used at first, with gradual teaching of
English words as needed. Of course the expert/literate should be able
to quickly skip the unneeded novice/illiterate lessons and get into
the expert stuff.
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Date: Sunday, 31-Jul-83 01:24:52-PDT
From: Lauren Weinstein <vortex!lauren@LBL-CSAM>
Subject: "Experts"
Greetings. Why is it that people seem to always use me as an example?
Oh well, such is the price of "high visibility", I guess. I would
think that most people will always tend to largely rely on one or two
experts when they wish to gather quick, useful opinions on a
particular subject. Having the technical ability to reach lots of
people is kinda nice, but we all tend to rely upon those persons whose
opinions we've found valuable in the past, rather than spend too much
time testing out "unproven" ground. I'm not saying that this is
necessarily good, but most of us behave in this fashion much of the
time.
--Lauren--
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Date: 29 July 1983 2049-PDT (Friday)
From: marcus at AEROSPACE (Leo Marcus)
Subject: benefits of technology
Some of the responses to the question of relative benefits of
technology are hard to leave unanswered.
For example:
Who would want to fight a war if they have all
the goods and services they would ever need or want?
The author of this comment obviously was not considering religious
wars, wars stemming from nationalistic jealousy, depraved leaders,
etc. He also thinks that people would quite easily achieve a state
where they have all the goods and services they would ever need or
want.
The true test of the benefits of technology, in my opinion, is whether
the human race can make it from one threat of omnicide to the next,
without having any of them materialize. The first item on this list
is nuclear war. Just as the threat is not due solely to technology,
the solution cannot come solely from technology.
U
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Date: Sunday, 31-Jul-83 01:24:52-PDT
From: Lauren Weinstein <vortex!lauren@LBL-CSAM>
Subject: "Human Change"
One does indeed wonder how much all of this shiny technology will
really change any fundamental aspects of human beings. I have my
doubts. In the final analysis we've changed very little in the last
10,000 years or more, and I suspect that the inner drives that keep us
going will change very little, fundamentally, in the next 10,000
years. We're still the same competitive, warlike, and perpetually
horny creatures we've been for a long, long time. The name of the
game may change, and the rules of the game may even vary somewhat over
time, but the game itself remains much the same.
--Lauren--
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Date: 29 Jul 83 15:56-EST (Fri)
From: Steven Gutfreund <gutfreund.umass-cs@UDel-Relay>
Subject: re: secretaries and managers
Personally REM, I am probably closer to you than to the managers.
Especially when it comes to mundane things like ATM's.
Still, I think you are slightly hasty or mistaken that it will only
take time for managers to shift their allegiance from secretarial
responsibility to machines.
I believe that there are certain different personality types in the
world and that even with great passage of time only minor shifts
occur.
Look at the interest that "human" operator telephones can develop, or
human staffed restaurant versus automats and vending machines.
No, REM, it will take more than the passage of time for human services
such as secretarial work to fade into quaint obscurity.
- Steven Gutfreund
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Date: 28 Jul 1983 05:25:43-PST
From: whm.arizona@Rand-Relay
Subject: Debugger Query--Summary of Replies
Several weeks ago I posted a query for information on debuggers. The
information I received fell into two categories: information about
papers, and information about actual programs. The information about
papers was basically subsumed by two documents: an annotated
bibliography, and soon-to-be-published conference proceedings. The
information about programs was quite diverse and somewhat lengthy. In
order to avoid clogging the digest, only the information about the
papers is included here. A longer version of this message will be
posted to net.lang on USENET.
The basic gold mine of current ideas on debugging is the Proceedings
of the ACM SIGSOFT/SIGPLAN Symposium on High-Level Debugging which was
held in March, 1983. Informed sources say that it is scheduled to
appear as vol. 8, no. 4 (1983 August) of SIGSOFT's Software
Engineering Notes and as vol. 18, no. 8 (1983 August) of SIGPLAN
Notices. All members of SIGSOFT and SIGPLAN should receive copies
sometime in August.
Mark Johnson at HP has put together a pair of documents on debugging.
They are:
"An Annotated Software Debugging Bibliography"
"A Software Debugging Glossary"
I believe that a non-annotated version of this bibliography appeared
in SIGPLAN in February 1982. The annotated bibliography is the basic
gold mine of "pointers" about debugging.
Mark can be contacted at:
Mark Scott Johnson
Hewlett-Packard Laboratories
1501 Page Mill Road, 3U24
Palo Alto, CA 94304
415/857-8719
Arpa: Johnson.HP-Labs@RAND-RELAY
USENET: ...!ucbvax!hplabs!johnson
Two books were mentioned that are not currently included in Mark's
bibliography:
"Algorithmic Debugging" by Ehud Shapiro. It has information
on source-level debugging, debuggers in the language being
debugged, debuggers for unconventional languages, etc. It
is supposedly available from MIT Press. (From
dixon.pa@parc-maxc)
"Smalltalk-80: The Interactive Programming Environment"
A section of the book describes the system's interactive
debugger. (This book is supposedly due in bookstores
on or around the middle of October. A much earlier
version of the debugger was briefly described in the
August 1981 BYTE.) (From Pavel@Cornel.)
Ken Laws (Laws@sri-iu) sent me an extract from "A Bibliography of
Automatic Programming" which contained a number of references on
topics such as programmer's apprentices, program understanding,
programming by example, etc.
Many thanks to those who took the time to reply.
Bill Mitchell
The University of Arizona
whm.arizona@rand-relay
arizona!whm
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End of HUMAN-NETS Digest
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