June 2011
1 post
Hiatus? They loved us!
Ok, silly puns aside, I guess I was on a bit of an unplanned hiatus. I guess I should have expected that changing jobs, moving from one coast of the United States to the other, and finishing my Ph.D. might take up a bit of my time. Also, at the time I started this blog, I was working for Apple and, as you might imagine, I had to try and keep it low key. Well, that’s in the past, and...
August 2009
2 posts
Aug. 19th: International "_why We Fork" Day
Forgive me if I ramble a bit…
I sometimes wondered what the use of any of the arts was. The best thing I could come up with was what I call the canary in the coal mine theory of the arts. This theory says that artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. They are super-sensitive. They keel over like canaries in poison coal mines long before more robust types realize that...
Code vs Create
There is a rather long running debate in the world of programming regarding the utility of learning more than one programming language. This debate is not entirely dissimilar from the debate over how many human languages one should learn. Many of the pros and cons bandied about are almost identical: specializing in one language allows you to improve your proficiency and focus your efforts, leaning...
June 2009
1 post
If free will isn't real, why does it seem so real?
Being a scientist, a self-honest scientist, means accepting that the world is, on some level, deterministic. That is, a scientist must accept that, given an initial starting state, the result of following that state through time will always be the same. If this were not the case, then predictability and reproducibility go out the window, and we might as well all go home. Recently, a pair of...
May 2009
1 post
The Perfect Language?
I’d be tempted to say that ECMAScript Javascript is almost the perfect language: First class functions, Objects are just Hashes, Prototype inheritance, etc. I’d even be tempted to say that it would be an excellent language to have students learn as their first language, but I won’t. Why not? Two reasons:
There are far too many bad examples of Javascript coding practice...
April 2009
4 posts
Ruby 1.9 is turning out to be an excellent functional language: 0.upto(10).map{|i| ->(n, i) {n + i}.curry[i]}.each{|p| puts p.(3)}
I’m glad that Vonnegut used a semicolon in the last book he wrote before he died; it makes me more comfortable doing so too.
What's wrong with this picture?
So many programmers are men. So many. It’s positively ridiculous!
…but why? I recently proposed that the future of programming languages lay with the development of a language which is closer to modeling human thought patterns than the patterns of the computations that actually take place. That is, integer math should be less important than string manipulation, for a start.
Of...
The Idea Surfer
Sometimes I feel like an idea surfer. The key is to see the good waves a long way out, when those ideas are little more than swells. They will not stand out from the rest, but something about them tells me that these ideas will get big. When that wave approaches, you’ve got to start paddling at just the right time. Too soon, and you’ll get swept under. Too late, and that wave will pass...