Gilad Bracha’s presentation on Dart is interesting even if, like me, you do not intend to learn Dart. He has some good one-liners, especially digs at JavaScript, and some interesting ideas about programming language design. (JavaScript comes up frequently in…
Monthly Archives: April 2012
Santa Claus was just the tip of the iceberg
From Skippy Dies: Gradually the awful truth dawns on you that Santa Claus was just the tip of the iceberg — that your future will not be the rollercoaster ride you’d imagined, that the world occupied by your parents, the…
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Coffee posts
Five coffee-related blog posts: A little coffee on the prairie A tale of two espresso machines Why drugs often list headache as a possible side-effect Four simple devices I prefer Distribution of time people spend in coffee shops
D programming language
Until last week I’d barely heard of the D programming language. Then I had a chance to meet Walter Bright who designed the language in 1999. I also met Andrei Alexandrescu who has been collaborating on the design of D…
C++ at Facebook
Andrei Alexandrescu said in a panel discussion last week that when he joined Facebook two years ago, maybe 90% of the programmers wrote PHP and 10% C++. Now there are roughly as many C++ programmers as PHP programmers. One reason…
C++ Renaissance
Dynamic language developers who are concerned about performance end up writing pieces of their applications in C++. So if you’re going to write C++ anyway, why not write your entire application in C++? Library writers develop in C++ so that…
Square root of people
How do you infer the economic well-being of individuals from household income? At one extreme, you could just divide household income by the number of people in the household. This is naive because there are some economies of scale. It…
Classifier progress exaggerated?
Yesterday Simply Statistics linked to a paper with the provocative title Classifier Technology and the Illusion of Progress. I’ve only skimmed the article so far, but here are a few sentences that stood out. In particular, simple methods typically yield…
WinRT, Projections, and COM
Martyn Lovell gave a great talk on the new Windows Runtime at Lang.NEXT this week. You know it’s going to be a good talk when the speaker uses the word “soporific” four seconds into the presentation. One of the ideas…
Having the first word
From Too Big to Know: On the Net, the measure of one’s strength as an expert often is not that you have the final word on some topic but that you have the first word.
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Writing software for space probes
A few days ago I quoted Ron Garret on his experience debugging software running millions of miles away. Since then I discovered a video of a talk Garret gave at Google a few weeks ago. He talks about remote debugging…
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Fractional integration
Define the integration operator I by so I f is an antiderivative of f. Define the second antiderivative I2 by applying I to f twice: It turns out that To see this, notice that both expressions for I2 are equal…
Users will tolerate a lot to get their work done
Suppose users have a choice of two software applications. Application #1: Beautiful user interface, well documented, robust. It does 99% of what they need in order to get their work done, but they don’t know how to do the remaining…
Irrelevance of earlier dreams
From Daniel Lemire’s latest blog post: I find that this irrelevance of my earlier dreams is a common pattern throughout my life. My younger self was dreaming about having things and being someone. He thought this would bring happiness. He…
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a < b < c
In Python, and in some other languages, the expression a < b < c is equivalent to a < b and b < c. For example, the following code outputs “not increasing.” a, b, c = 3, 1, 2 if…
