Table of Contents
Abstract
We are not in a difficult situation when we need to write the introduction to this book, because the „original” Paternoster of Programmers can be a good muse for this, where in a minimalist style, the Éric Lévénez's timelines were mentioned. Now, we will try to give a more pathetic one.
„Facebook is not your friend.”
„A lot of people misinterpret that, as if I don't care about revenue or profit or any of those things. But what not being just a company means to me is not being just that — building something that actually makes a really big change in the world.” | ||
| --Mark Zuckerberg [FBB] David Kirkpatrick: The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World | ||
On the one hand, the background to the name
Paternoster is the metaphor that anybody can travel some floors. It
means exactly that the reader can choose an arbitrary task of current
interest from the wide spectrum of the tasks of the book and is able to
reproduce the solution that is also fully explained in the book
Paternoster. On the other hand, the Latin name Pater
noster has distinctly religious overtone, because it means the
Lord's Prayer. This direction is also confirmed by the fun question
asked in the lab sessions „Who can celebrate the source code”. The basic
message of the usage of the name paternoster is that programmers must
program every day.
But also there is one other motivation... The great ones of science give meaning to intuitive notions such as
The programming also has its own legendary hackers like Richard Stallman, Mark Zuckerberg or Linus Torvalds. But who will be the next genius who is able to give meaning to the following exciting notion standing on the shoulders of the giants. And what will be the next concept? The intuitive notion of love was reinterpreted by Jesus in the New Testament, but it has not still been developed deductively, in sense that it has no mathematical background. I believe, the most promising candidates are imagination and reality. This was the reason why the Penrose-Hameroff „Orch OR” model of consciousness was mentioned in the „original” Paternoster of Programmers [PP] as part of the introduction to quantum informatics.
Many programmers know the feeling that we really ought to write a good computer program. The root of this is that the programmers can create whole worlds in their programs. In this sense, beginner programmers have already participated in a sort of a genesis. It may be actually true for only a few professions. Programming something is a very constructive process, as Chaitin said in [METAMATH] „you understand something only if you can program it”. Based on Turing's work on computing machinery, in my humble opinion, programmers may do the next scientific conceptual breakthrough. For example, to define random infinite sequences of 0 and 1 is a hard mathematical statistical issue, but the same result is achieved, relatively easily, by using the algorithmically complexity.
When reading this book, it is important for dear readers to keep in mind that neither this book nor other books can give the excitement of writing programs. This book can be only the preliminary step in knowing the real nature of programming. First, try the examples in the book, then write your own modifications to these examples. Certainly you must work on real computers from the start of reading the book.