Friday 15 February 2013

Hello World

Brian Wilson Kernighan
Brian Wilson Kernighan
My first post started with the line "Hello World"! That line is there for a reason, a reason based on an old tradition, a tradition started by the legendary Brian Wilson Kernighan. 

For those who don't know Brian Kernighan, he is a Canadian computer scientist who worked at Bell Laboratories and contributed to the development of Unix, AWK & AMPL. It is he who came up with the word Unix. He is also famous as co-author of the first book on C programming language. His contributions as an author to computer programming, surpasses every other computer legends!
He is our Guru!

So what is the tradition that am talking about?
Printing the string "Hello World", is the, first program written by almost every programmers. Nearly all programming books start with hello world, and its the same with almost all teachers! Like iPod for any mp3 player, now a days hello world denotes any introductory program or script!
Am sure that by now, few of you might be wondering, why Hello World. And how did Kerninghan start this tradition!!

Four decades back, in 1972, while writing A Tutorial Introduction to the Language B, he scripted the following statements to explain external variables.
main( ) {
 extrn a, b, c;
 putchar(a); putchar(b); putchar(c); putchar('!*n');
}
a 'hell';
b 'o, w';
c 'orld';

Later in 1974, while writing an internal memorandum at Bell Labs for C programming, he added the following C version.


main()
{
  printf("hello, world");
}

The tradition took birth by its inclusion in on of the most influential books in computer science, The C Programming Language. From then, till now, hello world is a programmer's starting point, the introductory program.
It feels awesome to realize that after decades, such a simple program can influence the way we start programming, and above all, a humble computer scientist can guide us in our first steps of a never-ending saga!

And last but never the least, I would like to thank Brian Kernighan for teaching us, how to program!

Thursday 14 February 2013

Why Auxiliary Memory

Hello World!
This is my first blog post!!!
Yaa I know, am a little bit more late to start blogging; but as they say, "Better late than never...".

Ok, how many of you know what an Auxiliary Memory is!!??...
Am not expecting the computer guys to raise hands!!, by default all of you are supposed to know what it is. The question is for others, people who use computer for googling, for mailing, for facebook, for music and for those viral videos and random blogs like this...

What do you think the Auxiliary Memory is?

Am surprised that I can't expect most of you to know what it is even after googling. Why? Because we don't have much references available over the internet!!!! Am like, how is that possible!!?
Its weird and at the same time cool to know that even today, 14th of Feb 2013, Wikipedia is not having a dedicated article on Auxiliary Memory!!... 
Its weird, because Wikipedia without auxiliary memory, is like a dictionary without the word, paper!!..
And it feels cool, because now, am gona do that!... Click here to link to my wiki article. Its small and kind of precise, please add to it if you can spare some time.

Yaa, so as I had told in the article, auxiliary memories are mediums like USB drives, Hard Disks or CD-ROMs in which you store data for ever. Most of them can be shared and are non-volatile and economic. 

Now coming back to the subject, why is this blog named Auxiliary Memory? Its because this is might be my auxiliary memory. The mear intention behind this blog is to record & share stuffs that went through me. It would contain posts about my passions and profession, that includes photography, cycling, movies, travel, game designing, programming and many other things...

You can also catch me at sreenaths.com.

Thanks for being on my blog.

-Sreenath