Martin Erwig

How Hansel and Gretel, Sherlock Holmes, the movie Groundhog Day, Harry Potter, and other familiar stories illustrate the concepts of computing. Picture a computer scientist, staring at a screen and clicking away frantically on a keyboard, hacking into a system, or perhaps developing an app. Now delete that picture. In Once Upon an Algorithm, Martin Erwig explains computation as something that takes place beyond electronic computers, and computer science as the study of systematic problem solving. Erwig points out that many daily activities involve problem solving. Getting up in the morning, for example: You get up, take a shower, get dressed, eat breakfast. This simple daily routine solves a recurring problem through a series of well-defined steps. In computer science, such a routine is called an algorithm. Erwig illustrates a series of concepts in computing with examples from daily life and familiar stories. Hansel and Gretel, for example, execute an algorithm to get home from the forest. The movie Groundhog Day illustrates the problem of unsolvability; Sherlock Holmes manipulates data structures when solving a crime; the magic in Harry Potter's world is understood through types and abstraction; and Indiana Jones demonstrates the complexity of searching. Along the way, Erwig also discusses representations and different ways to organize data; “intractable” problems; language, syntax, and ambiguity; control structures, loops, and the halting problem; different forms of recursion; and rules for finding errors in algorithms. This engaging book explains computation accessibly and shows its relevance to daily life. Something to think about next time we execute the algorithm of getting up in the morning.

How Stories Explain Computing

Once Upon an Algorithm

Como histórias do nosso dia a dia, desde contos de fadas a filmes de fantasia e ficção científica podem ajudar a compreender conceitos de computação. Imagine um cientista computacional diante de uma tela digitando freneticamente em um teclado, invadindo um sistema. Agora delete essa cena. Em Era uma vez um algoritmo, Martin Erwig nos mostra a computação como algo além dos computadores elétricos e a ciência da computação como o estudo sistemático de resolução de problemas. Acordar de manhã, por exemplo: você se levanta, toma um banho, veste-se, toma o café da manhã. Essa simples rotina do cotidiano resolve um problema recorrente por meio de uma série de passos bem definidos. Na ciência da computação, uma rotina como a sua é chamada algoritmo.

Como as histórias explicam a computação

Era uma vez um algoritmo

Richard F. Paige

Eric Van Wyk

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Software Language Engineering, SLE 2013, held in Indianapolis, IN, USA, in October 2013. The 17 technical papers presented together with 2 tool demonstration papers and one keynote were carefully reviewed and selected from 56 submissions. SLE’s foremost mission is to encourage, synthesize and organize communication between communities that have traditionally looked at software languages from different and yet complementary perspectives. The papers are organized in topical sections on domain-specific languages; language patterns and evolution; grammars; tools; language analysis; and meta- and megamodelling.

Martin Erwig

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