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By Adrian Kosmaczewski, October 7th, 2024
Welcome to the 73rd issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, about Floating-Point Arithmetic. In this edition, we argue that floating-point arithmetic is the smartest concept in computer science; in the Library section, we review the unfortunately not entirely recommendable "Histoire Universelle des Chiffres" by Georges Ifrah; and in our Vidéothèque section, we learn more about the nature of floating-point numbers thanks to Tom Scott.
Every decade, programmers new to the industry must ingest a non-negligible amount of information in order to be proficient in their jobs. For the past five decades, however, this basic set of information has changed substantially, generating as a result a quite varied set of priorities in the minds of age-diverse programming teams.
When Jawed Karim, one of YouTube's co-founders, published the first video ever posted on the platform on April 23rd, 2005, it was hard to imagine that YouTube, at the time just another drop in a sea of Web 2.0 startups, would become 20 years later a media behemoth. YouTube enabled a new generation of "influencers" to turn any conceivable subject into a social phenomenon. This month's Vidéothèque movie is from one of the most beloved of those new stars: Tom Scott.
I am torn about this month's Library issue; I loved reading it, despite the many inaccuracies reported by third-party experts after its publication. The book in question is the "Histoire Universelle des Chiffres" ("From One to Zero: A Universal History of Numbers" in English) by Georges Ifrah, originally published in French, but also available in English and many other languages.