Really Understanding Computation

Tom Stuart's new book will shed light on what you're really doing when you're programming.

It’s great to see that Tom Stuart’s Understanding Computation has made it out. I’ve been excited about this book ever since we signed it.

Understanding Computation started from Tom’s talk Programming with Nothing, which he presented at Ruby Manor in 2011. That talk was a tour-de-force: it showed how to implement a more-or-less complete programming system without using any libraries, methods, classes, objects, or even control structures, assignments, arrays, strings, or numbers. It was, literally, programming with nothing. And it was an eye-opener.

Shortly after I saw the conference video, I talked to Tom to ask if we could do more like this. And amazingly, the answer was “yes.” He was very interested in teaching the theory of computing through Ruby, using similar techniques. What does a program mean? What does it mean for something to be a program? How do we build languages that can handle ever more flexible abstractions? What kinds of problems can’t we solve computationally? It’s all here, and it’s all clearly demonstrated via Ruby code. It’s not code that you’d ever use in a real application (trust me, doing arithmetic without numbers, assignments, and control statements is ridiculously slow). But it is code that will expand your mind and leave you with a much better understanding of what you’re doing when you’re programming.

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