11.12.24
John Longley's Informatics Lecturer Song
From my colleague, John Longley, a treat.
‘Informatics Lecturer Song’
(Based on Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘Major General song’)
John Longley
For educating students you will never find a betterer.
I teach them asymptotics with a rigour that’s impeccable,
I’ll show them how to make their proofs mechanically checkable.
On parsing algorithms I can hold it with the best of them,
With LL(1) and CYK and Earley and the rest of them.
I’ll teach them all the levels of the Chomsky hierarchy…
With a nod towards that Natural Language Processing malarkey.
I’ll summarize the history of the concept of a function,
And I’ll tell them why their Haskell code is ‘really an adjunction’.
In matters mathematical and logical, etcetera,
I am the very model of an Informatics lecturer.
For matters of foundations I’m a genuine fanaticker:
I know by heart the axioms of Principia Mathematica,
I’m quite au fait with Carnap and with Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,
And I’ll dazzle you with Curry, Church and Turing combinators.
I’ll present a proof by Gödel with an algebraic seasoning,
I’ll instantly detect a step of non-constructive reasoning.
I’ll tell if you’re a formalist or logicist or Platonist…
For I’ll classify your topos by the kinds of objects that exist.
I’ll scale the heights of cardinals from Mahlo to extendible,
I’ll find your favourite ordinals and stick them in an n-tuple.
In matters philosophical, conceptual, etcetera,
I am the very essence of an Informatics lecturer.
And right now I’m getting started on my personal computer,
I’ve discovered how to get it talking to the Wifi router.
In Internet and World Wide Web I’ve sometimes had my finger dipped,
And once I wrote a line of code in HTML/Javascript.
[Sigh.] I know I have a way to go to catch up with my students,
But I try to face each lecture with a dash of common prudence.
When it comes to modern tech: if there’s a way to get it wrong, I do!
But that seems to be forgiven if I ply them with a song or two.
So… although my present IT skills are rather rudimentary,
And my knowledge of computing stops around the nineteenth century,
Still, with help from all my colleagues and my audience, etcetera…
I’ll be the very model of an Informatics lecturer.
Labels: Computing, Edinburgh, Programming Languages, Theatre, University
