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Marc L. Smith
Associate Professor
Computer Science Department
Vassar College
Coordinates
Office: SP 104.5 Voice: 845 437 7497 E-mail: mlsmith@vassar.edu | Vassar College, Box 399 124 Raymond Avenue Poughkeepsie, NY 12604-0399 |
Fall 2020
- CMPU-377: Parallel Programming
- Lectures: Mon/Wed 12:00–1:15pm
- CMPU-381: Relational Databases and SQL
- Lectures: Mon 3:10–5:10pm
- Office hours:
- tbd and by appointment
Research Interests
- Bioinformatics (phylogenetic analysis, evolutionary robotics)
- Models of Parallel and Distributed Computation
- Unifying Theories of Programming
Quotes
Computer Science is the art of turning constants into variables. –Donald Knuth
The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. –Fred Brooks (The Mythical Man Month)
Computer science inverts the normal. In normal science, you're given a world, and your job is to find out the rules. In computer science, you give the computer the rules, and it creates the world. –Alan Kay
Though OOP came from many motivations…the small scale [motivation] was to find a more flexible version of assignment, and then to try to eliminate it altogether. –Alan Kay, The Early History of SmallTalk
SQL, Lisp, and Haskell are the only programming languages that I've seen where one spends more time thinking than typing. –Philip Greenspun
(( λ (x) (x x)) ( λ (x) (x x)))