[Edu-sig] CS + theater

[kirby urner]

On Thu, Apr 5, 2012 at 10:39 AM, Philip Guo <pg at cs.stanford.edu> wrote:
> Agreed that finding more synergies (pardon my business-speak) between
> computing and the liberal arts can be wonderful.  Reminds me a bit of
> Computing for Poets:
>
> http://cs.wheatoncollege.edu/~mleblanc/131/
>

Yes.

Theater in particular because they hand you a "Programme" as you go
in, and the actors are following "scripts".  Objects in Python are likewise
actors.  Having a "self" makes OO intrinsically theatrical (agents doing
stuff, acting out).

Problems of parallelism might be "acted out" (Johnny, you block over
here, until you, Sally, are ready to accept from the queue... OK Johnny,
she's ready, walk your message to Jimmy for pre-processing...).

I think the Liberal Arts could swallow CS tomorrow if CS were willing
(CS has its reservations, nostalgia about math, but I say were
swallowing math too so come on in the water's fine -- spoken like
a true Philosophy major).

Related:  I practice a quaint Amish-like (Weird Al like) branch of
Quakerism wherein we call ourselves "unprogrammed", the idea
being if you follow a preacher and stand up and sit down a lot,
you're just a big fat computer (holdover 1600s backlash against
bloated churches).  Here's a picture of our quaint little sign:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/17157315@N00/7037954577/in/photostream
(note small print)

Yes, Religion and theater go together -- any ethnographer could
tell you that.

Kirby