The article focuses on computer science education and the global outsourcing of software production. It is reported in this article that producing software is expensive and programmers are highly paid. However, studie...
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The article focuses on computer science education and the global outsourcing of software production. It is reported in this article that producing software is expensive and programmers are highly paid. However, studies have found that the average number of lines of code written per month can be as low as 60 and is rarely higher than a few thousand. Off-shoring has become an increasingly common choice for companies hoping to reduce costs. Estimates are that a company can reduce its costs of producing software by about 30 percent by offshore outsourcing. In the U.S., various economic and legal solutions have been proposed to counter off-shoring.
This article focuses on the computer programming language Cobol. Today roughly two-thirds of programmers use Cobol. The second-place language (variously said to be C, Fortran, or RPG) is (a) very far behind, and (b) h...
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This article focuses on the computer programming language Cobol. Today roughly two-thirds of programmers use Cobol. The second-place language (variously said to be C, Fortran, or RPG) is (a) very far behind, and (b) has a decade-dependent identity. Other programming languages come and go;. none has survived and been as successful as Cobol. However Cobol is the most criticized language in software development and maintenance. The usual reason given for this contradiction is that software practitioners are an incredibly stubborn lot, stuck in place and refusing to change. In this view, it is the intransigence of those in the trenches that has man- aged to keep poor old Cobol alive for its over 40 year life span, in spite of the wisdom and knowledge of everyone else in the field. There are several reasons that make Cobol more usable. Cobol has the capability for heterogeneous, 'record-structure' data. Secondly it has the capability for decimal arithmetic and convenient report generation.
AbstractThe SPEEDCOP project recently completed at Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) extracted over 50,000 misspellings from approximately 25,000,000 words of text from seven scientific and scholarly databases. The mis...
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AbstractThe SPEEDCOP project recently completed at Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) extracted over 50,000 misspellings from approximately 25,000,000 words of text from seven scientific and scholarly databases. The misspellings were automatically classified and analyzed and the results used to design and implement a program that proved capable of correcting most such errors. Analysis of the performance of the spelling error detection and correction programs highlighted the features that should be incorporated into a powerful and user‐friendly interactive system suitable for nonprogram‐mers. These include document level thresholds for misspelling detection, automatic reuse of user decisions, and user verification and control of correction. An advantage of the proposed design is that the system automatically customizes itself to its environment. This article is primarily concerned with system design, not implementation deta
The article presents an interview with computer programmer Edsger W. Dijkstra. Dijkstra comments on how he left the Netherlands to study computer programming in Cambridge, England and how he developed an algorithm to ...
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The article presents an interview with computer programmer Edsger W. Dijkstra. Dijkstra comments on how he left the Netherlands to study computer programming in Cambridge, England and how he developed an algorithm to find the shortest distance between two points as a way of demonstrating the Automatic Calculator Mathematical Centre (ARMAC) system. He comments on how multilingualism is useful in computer programming.
The article discusses the rules for biologists to acquire a computational skill set. These include selecting the programming language that suits one’s goals, applying critical thinking and problem solving skills in e...
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The article discusses the rules for biologists to acquire a computational skill set. These include selecting the programming language that suits one’s goals, applying critical thinking and problem solving skills in each task, as well as asking for technical support from a community of programmers for a certain scientific application.
Current practice in Web application development is based on the skills of the individual programmers and often does not apply the principles of software engineering. The increasing economic relevance and internal comp...
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Current practice in Web application development is based on the skills of the individual programmers and often does not apply the principles of software engineering. The increasing economic relevance and internal complexity of the new generation of Web applications require that proper quality standards are reached and that development is kept under control. It is therefore likely that the formalization of the process followed while developing these applications will be one of the major research topics. In this paper we focus on Web application testing, a crucial phase when quality and reliability are a goal. Testing is considered in the wider context of the whole development process, for which an incremental/iterative model is devised. The processes behind the testing activities are analyzed considering the specificity of Web applications, for which the availability of a reference model is shown to be particularly important. The approach proposed in this paper covers the integration testing phase, which can take advantage of some features of Web applications (e. g., the http protocol employed), thus resulting in a higher level of automation with respect to traditional software. The testing processes described in this paper are supported by the prototype research tool TestWeb. This tool exploits a reverse engineered UML (Unified Modeling Language) model of the Web application to generate and execute test cases, in order to satisfy the testing criteria selected by the user. The usage of this tool will be presented with reference to a real-world case study.
This article reports on the development of computer software codes and the arguments as to whether they should be released by researchers. The software codes give insight into research methodology during the peer revi...
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This article reports on the development of computer software codes and the arguments as to whether they should be released by researchers. The software codes give insight into research methodology during the peer review process for research, but there is disagreement as to whether the computer codes should be released because, most of the time, they were not developed by the researchers themselves. The article discusses the practices, procedures, and standards of software programming, noting problems with liability for errors. Information is also provided on the protection of intellectual property, as well as on research on climate change and nanotechnology.
When the Java programming language became available in 1995, Tokyo Research Laboratory of IBM Corp. decided to create a new system for mobile agents through a project called Aglets that would operate comfortably in th...
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When the Java programming language became available in 1995, Tokyo Research Laboratory of IBM Corp. decided to create a new system for mobile agents through a project called Aglets that would operate comfortably in the open system world of Java and the Internet. It was designed by referring to Java's applet and event delegation model, so Java programmers could learn and use it easily to take advantage of mobile agents. An Aglet is a composite Java object that includes mobility and persistence and its own thread of execution and can communicate with other Aglets. It also has its own credentials to indicate who implemented and instantiated it. Based on these credentials, a receiving computer can limit the behavior of incoming Aglets. Using Aglets, a programmer can readily implement autonomous objects in a distributed computing environment. Aglet is rendered through a programming style involving a call-back model based on the Java event delegation model. Each event gives an Aglet the opportunity to determine how to react.
Many systems are designed to help novices who want to learn programming, but few support those who are not necessarily interested in learning programming. This paper targets the subset of end-user programmers (EUPs) i...
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Many systems are designed to help novices who want to learn programming, but few support those who are not necessarily interested in learning programming. This paper targets the subset of end-user programmers (EUPs) in this category. We present a set of principles on how to help EUPs like this learn just a little when they need to overcome a barrier. We then instantiate the principles in a prototype and empirically investigate them in three studies: a formative think-aloud study, a pair of summer camps attended by 42 teens, and a third summer camp study featuring a different environment attended by 48 teens. Finally, we present a generalized architecture to facilitate the inclusion of Idea Gardens into other systems, illustrating with examples from Idea Garden prototypes. Results have been very encouraging. For example, under our principles, Study #2's camp participants required significantly less in-person help than in a previous camp to learn the same amount of material in the same amount of time.
The article discusses various issues related to Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI software has finally begun to prove itself in the marketplace, especially with computer vision systems, natural language programs, and e...
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The article discusses various issues related to Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI software has finally begun to prove itself in the marketplace, especially with computer vision systems, natural language programs, and expert systems that give advice like a human specialist. AI itself has become the cornerstone of plans for a so-called fifth generation of intelligent computers due in the 1990's. AI has become a top research priority in Europe and it is the inspiration for work on totally new kinds of computers organized in ways not dissimilar to the human brain. The demand for trained AI programmers has put a severe strain on the community's manpower resources. The clubby atmosphere of AI had begun to change well back in the 1970's, as more and more young researchers entered the field and as the increasing sophistication of AI programs began to stimulate interest on the outside. More recently, at least three companies have started commercial manufacture of computers specialized for LISP, the language of choice for AI applications.
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