Tangible computing
May 25th, 2016 | Published in Uncategorized
A few weeks ago I ran into Larry Yang while walking through the ground floor of FAC, and he gestured to the students around and asked if it made me nostalgic for when I was a student. I had to point out that things had changed a lot since I was a student; in fact, as an undergraduate I had completed assignments by punching FORTRAN programs onto punch cards. I mentioned this to Owen Allsop during our mentoring meeting, and he commented, and his comment was that he never thought of programming as being that physical.
It’s certainly true that there’s a lot more distance between the programmer and tangible objects than there used to be. In the end, though, something physical has to change for our programs to do anything.
As long as I’m going on about understanding the hardware, I’ll link to the great story of Mel, the Real Programmer. Who thinks about things like that these days?