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Name:   2010-07-03 1:14

6.002

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-002-circuits-and-electronics-spring-2007/video-lectures/embed01/

In this lecture, the professor explains how computer science and programming languages have been abstracted from other abstractions, starting from

Observations of nature in experiments

to

Laws of Physics, generalizations that we can apply to these observations (Maxwell’s equations, Ohm’s law, etc.)

to

Lumped circuit abstractions

to

Digital abstractions

to

Lumped circuit abstractions

to

Combinational logic abstractions

to

Clocked digital abstractions

to

Instruction set abstractions (ex. x86, alpha)

and finally to programming languages.

MIT's EE and CS departments are conjoint for good reason.  Don't you think there is something incoherently wrong of people jumping into programming without having a solid understand of what programing has been abstracted upon?

Name: Anonymous 2010-07-03 2:02

There is nothing about programming that necessitates the entire stack you mention. CS (and, by extension, programming languages) doesn't fundamentally depend on physical computers, and certainly not the specific computers you seem to think everyone should be using.

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