AKMA’s Random Thoughts

i was always partial to erasmus....though i have a tremendous respect for Luther (he was freakin' genius!)...

...interestingly, my father (the retired methodist minister) scored a Karl Barth.

Well, that wasn't a tremendously thorough quiz, and dealt as much or more with each of our argumentative personalities as our doctrinal idiosyncrasies. I bet we could do better, if we all put our minds to it. ;)

I noticed that you left the quiz name as mentioned in the graphic -- the title of the quiz page does (more accurately) specify "Christian theologian," so I changed it when I put the code on my own page. So there are two possible answers to your question: among Christian theologians, I would like to be Clement of Alexandria, and among all theologians, I would like to be Yochanan ben Zakkai.

oh well shit! i didn't realize we could venture outside of Christianity....in that case, make me Nagarjuna.

Luther's obsessif antisemitism turned me off him for good. As for non-christian theologians, give me al-Ghazali. Sufis rule.

The most basic duality that exists with variables is how the programmer sees them in a totally different way than the computer does. When you're typing away in Project Builder, your variables are normal words smashed together, like software titles from the 80s. You deal with them on this level, moving them around and passing them back and forth.

The Stack is just what it sounds like: a tower of things that starts at the bottom and builds upward as it goes. In our case, the things in the stack are called "Stack Frames" or just "frames". We start with one stack frame at the very bottom, and we build up from there.

To address this issue, we turn to the second place to put variables, which is called the Heap. If you think of the Stack as a high-rise apartment building somewhere, variables as tenets and each level building atop the one before it, then the Heap is the suburban sprawl, every citizen finding a space for herself, each lot a different size and locations that can't be readily predictable. For all the simplicity offered by the Stack, the Heap seems positively chaotic, but the reality is that each just obeys its own rules.

We can see an example of this in our code we've written so far. In each function's block, we declare variables that hold our data. When each function ends, the variables within are disposed of, and the space they were using is given back to the computer to use. The variables live in the blocks of conditionals and loops we write, but they don't cascade into functions we call, because those aren't sub-blocks, but different sections of code entirely. Every variable we've written has a well-defined lifetime of one function.

When the machine compiles your code, however, it does a little bit of translation. At run time, the computer sees nothing but 1s and 0s, which is all the computer ever sees: a continuous string of binary numbers that it can interpret in various ways.

When Batman went home at the end of a night spent fighting crime, he put on a suit and tie and became Bruce Wayne. When Clark Kent saw a news story getting too hot, a phone booth hid his change into Superman. When you're programming, all the variables you juggle around are doing similar tricks as they present one face to you and a totally different one to the machine.