Year 2003 is just about to say goodbye. We techies had, in general a fairly
bad year. When one is looking for the latest DDK to approach an interview,
someone else is chewing nails in front of the console with a nasty bug that
had to be solved yesterday. And yet another one is fighting his/her right to
ask question, sometime without detail, and getting upset about the kind of
work (debugging) the person is doing that not many people want to do
willingly and get paid or to have a high self-respect. And yet, there are
very experienced and seasoned professional getting frustrated due to lack of
work mainly because of off shoring. Yet some others were fighting for the
right debugger of choice or the right programming language to do system
software. Yet some other was desperate enough to ask for ready-made source
code. Well it might be bad or good depends on perspective, but it is surely
bad because lot of us were highly charged, some negatively, some positively
as if some fusion went in. And I was no exception; it is the human nature I
think. And there were sourly exchange about open close and semi-closed
softwares, often affectionately called open-sore. And yet there were
discussion about not using HTML (Highly Terminal and Malignant Language) in
a news group. And yet there were discussion about the stupid ( Oh, sorry
smart ) people leaving their email set to respond ?I?m out of office for no
business of yours, so you deserve this email( piece of shit)?. Again there
were those sending email with fonts that was highly unreadable by anyone
descendent of ape. Yet again, some poor fellow was fighting hard to justify
using virus protection even if it is just intravenous distilled water with
numerous side affects. That poor fellow is me, and was thinking it is better
to have a life with little organ missing than not to have a life. NEEDLESS
TO SAY THAT I DON?T RETHINK ABOUT THESE STUFF. But I thought about the
origin of bugs. Why bugs need to invade us, and who is responsible for this
???
First I thought it must be Ken Thomson and Richie, since they invented Unix.
Then I thought who cares about Unix, it must be Dave Cutler since we are
using NT here. Again I thought it must be those three stoogers who made the
360 General purpose computing possible. Again I thought about Von Neumann,
since he was the father of stored program. Oh, I know it must be Linus.
Well it sounds like I?m lost, as usual.
TO ME, it is David Hilbert. If I see him, I would I will kill him, period?.
[? back in the dark age ?]
Late 19th Century, Peano developed formal specification for Number theory,
in particular the successor function.
At the turn of the 20th century Russell and Whitehead attempted to derive
mathematical truth directly from logical truth that was built during ?back
in the dark age? mainly by Bool, DeMorgan and others. Soon after Hilbert
proposed a program to demonstrate that Whitehead?s Principia Mathematica
really did describe mathematics totally. He required proof for its
consistency and completeness. Alas, Godel showed it otherwise?
But Hilbert?s program (sometimes dubbed as Hilbert?s 10 problems) prompted a
vigorous investigation into the theory of computation. During 1930?s three
different formal approaches were proposed: Turing Machine, Recursive
Function Theory, and Lambda Calculus. Later it was shown that they are
essentially computationally equivalent. Hence the birth of universal halting
problem. Till today, lots of computationally unsolved problem are first
shown equivalent to halting problem.
In the forties and fifties, due to digital electronics, full swing
development of high level languages started. McCarthy was parenting
parenthesis with LISP (least important specification for programming ) which
is a cocktail of lambda calculus and recursive function theory.
In the sixties, Ladin, et all, built an abstract interpreter for Algol 60,
using Lambda calculus as the vehicle. McCarthy also had an abstract
interpreter for LISP using the same technique. And that gave birth of Vienna
Definition Language(VDL), affectionately it could be called Virtually dead
Language. IBM?s PL/1 is formed out of this. Then Bacus came to the scene to
form the BNF(basic nonsense for formula) grammer, that also prompted
language development?
Now we are blessed with many computing environment due to this and other
development paths.
A very sharp hard of people are trying to solve the following, since proving
either false or true conclusively has a fundamental effect on the theory of
computation. May be a fast factoring method to make most cryptography look
horrible !!! -
BOOLEAN eureka ( BOOLEN p, BOOLEAN np)
{
return ( ( p == np) ? true:false );
}
But surely it was due to David Hilbert?s curiosity ?
So bugs must be his contribution!!!
Next time I put a kernel stack from a Bugcheck, you know that I?m fixing
Hilbert?s bug, and definitely not mine -:).
Prokash Sinha
Sr. Software Architect.
Consumer Electronics Division.
MAXTOR Inc.
California.