Sure the equalities indicate some possibility for disagreement but THIS LANGUAGE IS MORE DYNAMIC THAN THAT IS A LINGUISTIC CONSTRUCT WHICH IS WIDELY AGREED UPON BY MOST USERS OF THE TERM. To a man they will tell you lisp > Ruby > python >= Obj C > C++ >= C. Don’t let them weasel out force them to pick (if they say they don’t know ask what they think other people would say). Go ask people in CS (theory or practice) which is more dynamic C++ or python, Obj C or C, Ruby or Obj C, python or lisp. You may feel the terminology is inapt, inelegant, a poor way to extend the language but don’t pretend it doesn’t make sense. You know damn well what people mean when they say they want a more dynamic language the same way I know what people mean when they say “I literally felt like I could fly” to describe how they felt. Update: why is it called “memoization” and not “memorization”?ĭon’t be a pedant. 159).Īs with algorithms, so too with dynamic languages? So I used it as an umbrella for my activities” (p. It was something not even a Congressman could object to.
Thus, I thought dynamic programming was a good name. Try thinking of some combination that will possibly give it a pejorative meaning. It also has a very interesting property as an adjective, and that is it’s impossible to use the word, dynamic, in a pejorative sense. Let’s take a word that has an absolutely precise meaning, namely dynamic, in the classical physical sense. 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. But planning, is not a good word for various rea- sons. What title, what name, could I choose? In the first place I was interested in planning, in decision making, in thinking. 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. The RAND Corporation was employed by the Air Force, and the Air Force had Wilson as its boss, essentially. You can imagine how he felt, then, about the term, mathematical. His face would suffuse, he would turn red, and he would get violent if people used the term, research, in his presence. I’m not using the term lightly I’m using it precisely. He was Secretary of Defense, and he actually had a pathological fear and hatred of the word, research. We had a very interesting gentleman in Washington named Wilson. “An interesting question is, ‘Where did the name, dynamic programming, come from?’ The 1950s were not good years for mathematical research. My first task was to find a name for multistage decision processes. “I spent the Fall quarter (of 1950) at RAND. I recently learned the answer from my colleague, Guy Blelloch, who dug up the explanation from Richard Bellman himself: Everyone who has studied algorithms has wondered “why the hell is Bellman’s memorization technique called dynamic programming?”.