5 Steps to Create Technical Documentation That’s (Actually) Helpful | Planio

For as long as we’ve had tools we need help using (and language to talk to each other), we’ve had technical documentation. (Don’t believe me? The first example of technical writing in English dates back to the Middle Ages when Chaucer wrote a guide to the astrolabe—a device used for measuring…

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These are my links for July 20th through July 24th:

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The language of choice - Propositional logic was discovered by Stoics around 300 B.C., only to be abandoned in later antiquity and rebuilt in the 19th century by George Boole’s successors. One of them, Charles Peirce, saw its significance for what we now call logic circuits, yet that discovery too was forgotten until the 1930s. In the ’50s John McCarthy invented conditional expressions, casting the logic into the form we’ll study here; then in 1986 Randal Bryant repeated one of McCarthy’s constructions with a crucial tweak that made his report “for many years the most cited paper in all of computer science, because it revolutionized the data structures used to represent Boolean functions” (Knuth).1 Let’s explore and code up some of this heritage of millennia, and bring it to bear on a suitable challenge: playing tic-tac-toe.
Then we’ll tackle a task that’s a little more practical: verifying a carry-lookahead adder circuit. Supposedly logic gets used all the time for all kinds of serious work, but for such you’ll have to consult the serious authors; what I can say myself, from working out the code to follow, is that the subject offers a fun playground plus the most primitive form of the pun between meaning and mechanism.

You’re encouraged to read with this article’s code cloned and ready

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Chris's Digital Detritus

Videotext for the twenty first century.

5 Steps to Create Technical Documentation That’s (Actually) Helpful | Planio