MSc+Gradcert
Paul Coates

Architecture of Programming – Programming Architecture

Seymour Papert…

...talked about children using computers as instruments for learning and for enhancing creativity. The idea of an inexpensive personal computer was then science fiction. But Papert was conducting serious research in his capacity as a professor at MIT. This research led to many firsts. It was in his laboratory that children first had the chance to use the computer to write and to make graphics. The Logo programming language was created there, as were the first children’s toys with built-in computation. The Logo Foundation was created to inform people about Logo and to support them in their use of Logo-based software for learning and teaching.
Today Papert is considered the world’s foremost expert on how technology can provide new ways to learn. He has carried out educational projects on every continent, some of them in remote villages in developing countries. He is a participant in developing the most influential cutting-edge opportunities for children to participate in the digital world.
Papert’s seminal book Mindstorms: Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas.

Alan Kay…

...is one of the inventors of the Smalltalk programming language and one of the fathers of the idea of Object Oriented Programming. He is the conceiver of the laptop computer and the architect of the modern windowing GUI.
In the autumn of 1968, Kay first met Seymour Papert at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and became interested in the LOGO language. Kay’s entire concept of the role of the computer in society was shaken when he watched Papert and his colleagues teaching children how to program in LOGO.

”The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” Alan Kay.

Assembly code

ORG 100h
MOV AX, 5
MOV BX, 2
RET
END (calculates the sum between 5 and 2)

Components of any programming language:

• Datastructures
• Procedures
• Functions
• Conditional statements
• Mathematical statements
• Control structures

Fortran is the most popular of the early programming languages. This was aimed at solving problems at engineering & science. Spaghetti code- program’s source code – is often not organized and has portions of code that may belong at the bottom of the code at the top of the code or vice versa. Spaghetti code may also skip to other portions of the code numerous times making it hard to track down issues within the code. Finally, some users consider programs that contain several goto statements spaghetti code because they have to try to follow each of the goto statements throughout the whole program.

Pascal – an influential imperative programming language, developed in 1970 by Niklaus Wirth as a small and efficient language intended to encourage good programming practices using so called structured programming and data structuring. A derivative known as Object Pascal was designed for object oriented programming.

Niklaus E. Wirth…

...(b. February 15, 1934) a Swiss computer scientist, best known for designing several programming languages, including Pascal, and for pioneering several classic topics in software engineering. In 1984 he won the Turing Award for developing a sequence of innovative computer languages.
Programs = data structures + algorithms.