Sub-Titled : In The Quadrangle

Team. It seems that we have at least a pair of outstanding tasks which this weblog has promised. The first item is a book on programming fundamentals. The second is an open virtual machine, with a base of primitive instructions, that one can port between differing language application programming interfaces. The next "few" entries in this web-history should address each of these goals.

We will be working on a book that discusses programming starting with the abstractions found in general problem solving, seguing through the concepts in basic engineering, such as processes for building and recycling resources, and ending upon the foundational concepts in computer programming: algorithms, data structures, and automatons.  In the process, the text's capstone project will be the "open" virtual machine.

The text will be sub-titled, "In The Quadrangle".

A previous "web-post" outlines some of the author's experiences while briefly studying at Vanderbilt University during the Spring semester of 1989. In summary, while taking an introductory computing elective in Pascal, he spent one sunny weekend afternoon daydreaming and brainstorming in his dorm-room which lay near West End Avenue and Twenty-First Street during those years. These thoughts intermingled with memories of his freshman sweetheart and bus-riding companion, resulted in some of the most influential concepts in modern computing after they were shared with his instructor and classmates at Vanderbilt plus, most importantly, family members who worked in executive leadership at Sun Microsystems, during the 1980s through the millennium.

Concepts which have taken hold in the modern era were quite easily conceived by an insightful computing novice and amateur, yet they required the skills of professional engineers and computer scientist before they became part of everyday life. These concepts include object-orientation, architectures, programming-by-contract (rebranded "design-by-contract"), prefabricate structures (frameworks, patterns, templates, and stencils), generics, and the basic feature set of JAVA as a language with a "C-like" syntax.

Tons of low-hanging fruit and fallen fruit existed in the computing world of the late-1980s. Much still exists this day in the area of concern partitioning, the use of general-purpose structures,  and other subareas of computing and software engineering.

The goal of the introductory section of this text will be putting it all in perspective: problem-solving, engineering, and computer programming.
The author will develop some exerts of this "planned" text on-line in this web-history.