History of Computer Science: Programming Language

Almost every day, I can hear one or two of my classmates complain how hard the java is, and admire how amazing it is. I was wondering how many programing languages like java are there in the world, and none could tell a specific number as the answer since every minute there may be a new one will be created. However, we can clearly tell when the languages were built.

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The first three still widespread used programming languages-FORTRAN, LISP, and COBOL are designed in the 1950s. Moreover, the two key of language innovations was featured as nested block structure and lexical scoping.

The period from the late 1960s to the late 1970s brought a major flowing of programming languages. [1] C and SQL were developed during this period. However, at that time, designers were keeping trying on establishing fundamental paradigms.

Time went to 1980s, rather than inventing new paradigms, relative consolidation in imperative language took the main stage, and people start to focus on the large scale systems. C++, Common Lisp, and Matlab were developed during this period.

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The rapid growth of internet in 1990s provided a huge opportunity for new language to be adopted. Visual Basic, Ruby, Java, JavaScript, and PHP showed their appearance in the world. In particular, the Java rose to popularity. The current trends of programming language are integration with data bases, increased emphasis on mobility, and increasing support for functional programming in mainstream languages used commercially. [2]

 

Reference:  [1] [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_languages

History of Computer Science: Overview

How many hours are you work with computer every week? How many hours are you using computer for entertainment every day? In nineteen-century, computer was built for simply mathematical computing. No one at that time could imagine that computer would develop to the greatest manufacture in the science history; and almost every single person will have at least one. It takes almost 40 year from the first programmable computer appeared to the first personal computer started to sell. From then on, computer has been experiencing a burst illuminated explosion development, and occupied people’s life more and more.

 

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As the more and more widely applied of computer, computer science gradually separated and became a distinct academic discipline. The first computer science department was founded at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory in 1953. Then more and more universities from all over the world started to set computer science department. As a discipline, computer science spans a range of topics from theoretical studies of algorithms and the limits of computation to the practical issues of implementing computing systems in hardware and software. [1] The IEEE Computer Society (IEEE-CS) identifies four areas that it considers crucial to the discipline of computer science: theory of computation, algorithms and data structures, programming methodology and languages, and computer elements and architecture. [2]

Reference：[1] [2]Computer Science, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_science.

 

File Sharing: Google Drive and Dropbox

How do you share files with your friends and colleagues? Still burn a disc or copy to a USB drive? You are too much out of date. Send email and upload file as attachment? You are wasting time. Nowadays, there is a bevy of free services that offer tons of storage, and you can easily share files with one click. Moreover, beyond sharing, the server application also offers editing, retrieving, tracing and compliant functions; for example, Documents can directly show files in Google Drive and Dropbox.

Here briefly comparing 2 popular file sharing options:

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Google Drive: The free account storage for student is 30GB. You can create folder and place files into. The files are automatically synced to the cloud and to other devices running under the account. Document, spreadsheet, presentation can also be created under Drive folder, not only be uploaded. However, file sharing can only be set up through Drive's Web interface, which means you can do nothing out of line.

https://www.dropbox.com/pricing

Dropbox: It is among the first services to offer seamless upload and storage via its client software. All you need to do to sync files is put them in Dropbox's designated folder on a system with the client app, and the sync happens silently in the background. Sharing links and other admin functions can be done directly from the right-click menu, and you can share files through email or Facebook. However, the free storage is really limited; it is starting at 2GB and up to 16 GB by 500MB per reference.

Reference:

10 file-sharing options: Serdar Yegulalp, "Dropbox, Google Drive and more"

 

 

 

Data Structure

Data structure is a fundamental course for computer science student. It is not only related to hardware, like coding theory, storage and access method, but also highly related to software; operating system has to be considered about the data allocation problem.  So data structure is a core course that centralizes mathematics, computer software and hardware.

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A data structure is a particular way of storing and organizing data in a computer so that it can be used efficiently. Data structures are often related to efficient retrieval algorithms and indexing techniques. Usually, well-chosen data structure results in greater operating or storage efficiency. Different task need to find different data structure, and some are only fit to specific structure. For example, B-trees are particularly well-suited for implementation of databases, while compiler implementations usually use hash tables to look up identifiers.

                                                                                            http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~naeher/Professur/

There are some common data structures: Array stores elements in a specific order. Record is a value that contains other values. Hash table allows name value pairs freely added or deleted. Tree is generally used for sorting and searching. Graph can be used to represent networks.

The fundamental step to start a program is to find a suitable data structure, so be sure you can both understand and choose the right structure for your program.

References: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_structure http://baike.baidu.com/subview/9900/5066576.htm?fromId=9900&from=rdtself 

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