Introduction to Programming Languages

Wayne Zhao, Toomas Tennisberg

Java

Island

Most populated island (Indonesia itself is 4th most populated country, and has the largest Muslim population)

Largest city is Jakarta (also the capital of Indonesia for now), the “Big Durian”

Most widely spoken language is Javanese

It had been a kingdom for many centuries, which even endured European colonialism, and is now thriving

Geography

150,000km^2

13th largest island in the world

Volcanic in origin

Over 150 mountains

Perfect for rice cultivation

Longest river is the Solo river (600km)

Climate

Average temperature between 22 and 29

Wet season from November to April

Tropical rainforest

Human pressure on wildlife

Coffee

Grown in Java

Originally planted by Dutch

Decimated by rust :O (see later)

Arabica blends got replaced with less flavorful versions like robusta

While “java” used to refer to coffee grown in Java, now it can refer to any coffee since it’s genericized

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C and C#

Notes

Famous note; “middle C” is what’s where all the other notes on the piano are measured off (even though thought the middle note is clearly, like, E)

C# is enharmonic with D♭. Which means they sound the same in isolation on, say, a piano

C to C# is a half step.

You don’t really hear them played together at the same time but this happen in jazz

Python

PYTHON

Cold War British continuation of government plan

Central Government War Headquarters (BURLINGTON)

Cuban Missile Crisis happened and this caused it to be replaced in 1968

Pythonidae

Family of 31 species of snakes (that means they’re reptiles and all that comes with that)

Found in Africa, Asia, and Australia

Named for the mythical serpent killed by Apollo

Ruby

Aluminum Oxide

With some chromium added

Red in colour (Latin ruber - red)

One of the five cardinal gems

Birthstone for July

Value determined by four Cs (color, cut, clarity, carat weight)

Synthetic rubies since the nineteenth century

Juice

Ruby Red juice :D

Try some!

It’s grapefruit.

I don’t think you’ll want more.

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Haskell and Brook and Curry

Haskell Brooks Curry

Haskell Brooks Curry (1900-1982) was an amazing logician

He actually studied as a grad student at MIT!

Many mathematicians advised Curry not to study logic since it was considered “dead”

Curry was eventually convinced to study combinatory logic after reading Principia Mathematica

Developed combinators and their application to other areas of logic like lambda calculus

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Go

The game for humans

Oldest continuously played game

Objective to control the most territory

Very simple rules, very complex strategy (rules differ by country)

Believed to be impossible for computers

AlphaGo

Rust

Iron Oxide

Happens when iron reacts with oxygen

4Fe + 3O2 -> 2Fe2O3

Resulting material is weaker and larger than previous

Can cause structural collapse

Symbol of neglect and decay

Pestilence

Of order Pucciniales

A really common and diverse fungus that wrecks crops

Only infect plants (and each of the several thousand species only afflicts a few plants)

They looked like rust (iron oxide)

Historically, rust has been extremely damaging to crops, especially to coffee, pine blister, and cereals

Video Game

If you want this game, you can get it on Steam I guess

It’s like Minecraft in its open-world-ness, except it has significantly more raiding

Started off as a clone of DayZ

Unfortunately, it doesn’t feature the best part of Minecraft: punching trees to get materials

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Swift

Apodidae

Small, nimble bird

Similar to a swallow, but not related at all

Related to hummingbirds

Very fast (31m/s)

All continents except Antarctica

Lisp

Speech impediment

Misarticulation of sibilants ([s], [z], [ts], [dz], [ʃ], [ʒ], [tʃ], [dʒ]) or (s, z, ts, dz, sh, zh, tsh, dzh)

Sibilants are a slightly vaguely defined category where air is pushed over tongue and through teeth

Usually caused by tongue being too far to the front (beyond the teeth)

Can sometimes be fixed by speech therapy

PASCAL

Blaise Pascal

French religious philosopher who did science to relax himself at night

Worked on fluid dynamics in the seventeenth century

Showed that pressure is a function of height, not weight

Showed that atmospheric pressure drops with height

Pascal’s triangle

Pascal’s wager

Perl

Pearl

An object made out of calcium carbonate (CaCO3)

Found in molluscs

Usually formed around an irritant

Natural or cultured

R

Letters of the Alphabet

The Ancient Greeks had a “ρ”. Most people will say a capital “ρ” is a “R”. But it used to be the case that it was a symbol intermediate between “R” and “P”.

When “P” developed, “R” gained the tail to differentiate it.

The lowercase “r” is just Latin cursive. Imagine drawing “R” but not closing the loop all the way.

IPA

• “r” is very funky. It seems to make different sounds in all languages
• A lot of Romance languages make it a trill, except it ends up slightly different in these languages
• “r” sounds in general are called rhotic. But there are many types.
• Surprisingly, lowercase “r” isn’t what we call it in the IPA.
• The American “r” sound is actually represented by “ɹ” (except it gets written as “r”).

Julia

1984

Major character in the story

Active member of the Outer Party

Little knowledge of life before

Loved Winston

Got caught

Betrayed him

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Whitespace

Unicode Characters

• Possibly some of the most important Unicode characters
• Unicode actually lists 17 different “space separators” and 25 character have the White_Space property
• But even this isn’t all the whitespace characters humans use.
• Before typewriters, we actually used many more spaces.
• Humans used to put a space mid-way between the thin space and hair space for quotation marks, for instance.
• Spaces are important. When spaces change, the result looks unnatural.

Hollywood

Home of the US film industry

Formed in the early 20th century

Independent filmmakers running from Edison’s patent lawyers

Grew to be a major center for the film industry

Picked because it features a lot of different climes around it, mountains, valleys, deserts, oceans, etc.

It’s named after that giant “HOLLYWOODLAND” real estate sign

A lot of countries have their film industries with names like “Hollywood” or just get called “Hollywood of”