Warning: Update in progress. Before adding new content, I'm going through and updating the content that already existed that I haven't touched in years. Also fixing up a lot of CSS. I wrote bad code a very long time ago and it's taking a while to update it.
This page has not been looked at yet My apologies for any issues this may cause.

6.4 : Tranquility

We get a lot of questions about Tranquility in this class. I'm going to use this section to share our vision and frustrations with those of you who care to read. Tranquility is a custom language that Dr. Stuart wrote in the summer of '69 (it was actually 2019). I had a bit of input on it, but he wrote the compiler. Our goal is to create a language with no practical industry value. We've noticed that students come to college only willing to learn what will help them get a job. They want to learn as many languages as they can fit on their resume to make themselves "marketable". That being said, students are losing valuable skills and knowledge that is needed for actually being a valuable employee. There's a certain amount of understanding you need to be a good programmer. Anyone can copy and paste Java code from StackOverflow into an IDE and make it run. It takes a special, more valuable programmer to understand what the code is doing and how it relates to other concepts to write their own code and read documentation and comprehend it. I am not a master of any single language. Have I ever programmed in C++ or C\#? No. Do I know enough about how programming languages work to learn these languages quickly if needed? Yes. It's the understanding that is being lost. You'll learn proper resume building programming next term in CS-171. In this class, there's a much higher focus on just understanding how code interacts with machines. This is why we have Tranquility. We want to teach minimal coding with maximum understanding. If you truly take the time to learn the material, you won't have something to put on your resume, but you will have the skills you need to succeed in higher level courses.

How do you learn Tranquility? You only get the PDF manual. That's all you need. That's all you get. No Googling. No StackOverflow. Reading documentation is an amazing skill that will benefit you extremely in life. (You also have the help of TAs and the Professor)

Tranquility Manual

In addition to the PDF manual, we've decided to write man pages for Tranquility. Just like how the C library functions have man pages, so do the Tranquility built-in functions. The following sections are the man pages exactly how you'd see them if they were pulled up on tux.

A very special thank you to the Fall 21-22 and Winter 21-22 students who participated in the extra credit for Project 2 and wrote a man page. You all saved me quite a bit of work and taught me a few things I didn't know about the behavior of some of these functions. This little project was a lot of fun to work on and I really appreciate y'alls contributions. You all have been credited as authors on each page.