Skip to main content

Fifty Years of the Communications of the ACM

The ACM is celebrating 50 years of the Communications of the ACM this month. The first issue came out way back in January 1958 with just 20 pages. That issue contained articles about computing square-roots and programming a binary counter for the IBM Type 650 calculator. That was no tiny handheld calculator.

Computing has come a long way in those 50 years that no one even thinks about the content in that first issue! However there are still some gems from the early years of computing that maintain their relevance and provide insights into the Art of Computing. One such example, is the Letter to the Editor of the CACM by Edsger Dijkstra in 1968 entitled "Go To Statement Considered Harmful". That letter sparked a debate that goes on to this date. Whatever be one's point of view about "go to", it is a beautiful insight into the Art of Computing, a dying art that today's programmers are sadly no longer in touch with.

Technorati Tags: , ,

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

AD-5526 Digital Multimeter

The AD-5526 is an ancient multimeter from A&D but for $10 one can’t complain. Has all the basic features one would expect from a multimeter and at 5.2 cm X 9.5 cm X 2.6 cm, it’s quite compact. Uses a LRV08 12V alkaline battery – not a common battery in the USA.

Migrating from Palm Calendar to Google Calendar and iPhone

Here are the free steps to migrate from Palm's date book (or Pimlico's DateBk6 ) calendar to Google calendar for full iPhone sync. First, sync Palm with Palm Desktop . Next, open Palm Desktop, select the Calendar view, navigate to File | Export, select Export Type as Date Book Archive, Range as All and provide a file name. This will export the calendar data as Date Book Archive (.dba). There's a paid tool called DBA2CSV that converts .dba files to .csv files. However this can be done for free using Yahoo Calendar. Login into Yahoo Calendar and via Settings/Import, import the .dba file. It helps to have an empty Yahoo Calendar. Via Settings/Export, export the calendar as .csv file. Login to Google Calendar (also works with Google Apps For Your Domain GAFYD Calendar) and import the .csv file into any of the calendars. It is a good idea to create a test calendar and test the import before importing into your real calendar. That way if anything goes wrong, you can delet...

Fetching Stock Data From Yahoo For iOS Applications

Yahoo! provides a great service called Yahoo! Query Language (YQL) which provides a SQL-like interface to a whole bunch of Web services. YQL queries can also be performed via REST. A wide range of services can be accessed through YQL including Yahoo! Finance . A convenient way to play with YQL and explore the available Web services, is to use the YQL Console . The bottom right of the console lists all the data tables, grouped by provider. (Be sure to click "Show Community Tables" to view all the available tables.) The yahoo provider includes the data table yahoo.finance.quote . This table provides access to stock quotes from Yahoo! Finance. As an example, here's the YQL console showing a query for stock data for AAPL . The console helpfully shows the REST URL for the query at the bottom. Armed with the REST URL, it is trivial to write code in Objective-C/iOS to fetch quote data. Here's some code that takes in an NSArray of ticker symbols (NSStrings) and returns a ...