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There's much more to it than you suggest, but if marketing bothers you then check out the MIT Probabilistic Programming Project's talk at Strange Loop 2015: htt

There's much more to it than you suggest, but if marketing bothers you then check out the MIT Probabilistic Programming Project's talk at Strange Loop 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8QMqSWU76Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8QMqSWU76Q. Probabilistic programming is an area of huge academic activity, with deep connections to statistical inference, compiler design and, yes, UX.

riazrizvi 10y ago
Oh I see. It is now a recognized application field in CS like Big Data, due to maturity of a suite of different tools from APIs to data engines.
cscurmudgeon 10y ago
Academia is not exempt from marketing. And not all marketing is bad. :) Remember the origin of the term "dynamic programming"? > "I spent the Fall quarter (of 1950) at RAND. My first task was to find a name for multistage decision processes. An interesting question is, Where did the name, dynamic programming, come from? The 1950s were not good years for mathematical research. We had a very interesting gentleman in Washington named Wilson. He was Secretary of Defense, and he actually had a pathological fear and hatred of the word research. I’m not using the term lightly; I’m using it precisely. His face would suffuse, he would turn red, and he would get violent if people used the term research in his presence. You can imagine how he felt, then, about the term mathematical. The RAND Corporation was employed by the Air Force, and the Air Force had Wilson as its boss, essentially. Hence, I felt I had to do something to shield Wilson and the Air Force from the fact that I was really doing mathematics inside the RAND Corporation. What title, what name, could I choose? In the first place I was interested in planning, in decision making, in thinking. But planning, is not a good word for various reasons. I decided therefore to use the word “programming”. I wanted to get across the idea that this was dynamic, this was multistage, this was time-varying. I thought, let's kill two birds with one stone. Let's take a word that has an absolutely precise meaning, namely dynamic, in the classical physical sense. It also has a very interesting property as an adjective, and that it's impossible to use the word dynamic in a pejorative sense. Try thinking of some combination that will possibly give it a pejorative meaning. It's impossible. Thus, I thought dynamic programming was a good name. It was something not even a Congressman could object to. So I used it as an umbrella for my activities." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_programming#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_programming#History

riazrizvi 10y ago

Oh I see. It is now a recognized application field in CS like Big Data, due to maturity of a suite of different tools from APIs to data engines.

cscurmudgeon 10y ago

Academia is not exempt from marketing. And not all marketing is bad. :) Remember the origin of the term "dynamic programming"? > "I spent the Fall quarter (of 1950) at RAND. My first task was to find a name for multistage decision processes. An interesting question is, Where did the name, dynamic programming, come from? The 1950s were not good years for mathematical research. We had a very interesting gentleman in Washington named Wilson. He was Secretary of Defense, and he actually had a pathological fear and hatred of the word research. I’m not using the term lightly; I’m using it precisely. His face would suffuse, he would turn red, and he would get violent if people used the term research in his presence. You can imagine how he felt, then, about the term mathematical. The RAND Corporation was employed by the Air Force, and the Air Force had Wilson as its boss, essentially. Hence, I felt I had to do something to shield Wilson and the Air Force from the fact that I was really doing mathematics inside the RAND Corporation. What title, what name, could I choose? In the first place I was interested in planning, in decision making, in thinking. But planning, is not a good word for various reasons. I decided therefore to use the word “programming”. I wanted to get across the idea that this was dynamic, this was multistage, this was time-varying. I thought, let's kill two birds with one stone. Let's take a word that has an absolutely precise meaning, namely dynamic, in the classical physical sense. It also has a very interesting property as an adjective, and that it's impossible to use the word dynamic in a pejorative sense. Try thinking of some combination that will possibly give it a pejorative meaning. It's impossible. Thus, I thought dynamic programming was a good name. It was something not even a Congressman could object to. So I used it as an umbrella for my activities." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_programming#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_programming#History