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Practically everything has been floated as The Answer for solving the Software Crisis, a crisis that has been with us since the first hardware engineer said to the first software engineer, “Hey, I gue…
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It’s everybody’s favorite punching bag. Delivered direct from the heavenly spaces one IP address short of Digital Nirvana, XML was going to be the bread and jam and toast of the Millenial Computing Re…
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I take a real dim view of teaching “mathematically pure” CS to beginning students. You don’t start riding a motorcycle by doing experiments with gryroscopes in a lab; you listen to an instructor, get…
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Suppose that in a few years these theories are subjected to new tests and come out triumphant. Our secondary education will then run a great risk. Some teachers will no doubt wish to make room for the…
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“What are you hiding? Are you making kiddie porn? Laundering money? Spreading hate? Do you want the terrorists to win?” http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Eternal_Mainframe.html…
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Never forget that this social class is made up of computer nerds who spent their adolescence griping about Micro$oft. The computer nerds at the latter, in their time, laughed at the suits at IBM. This…
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Let me tell you something. Of all the time I have ever used DVCSes, over the last twenty years if we count Smalltalk changesets and twelve or so if you don’t, I have wanted to have the full history wh…
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They were handed to him on a silver platter by the rest of the marketIn order to resist the temptation this worldwide herd of mindless junk-peddlers and imitators have placed before him, it would not…
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What would I recommend learning? - C - Prolog - Erlang (I’m biased) - Smalltalk - Javascript - Hakell / ML /OCaml - LISP/Scheme/Clojure A couple of years should be enough (PER LA…
A First Post
Ok, here we go, yet another "online presence" of some sort. If this is still active six months from today, I'll give it its domain name.…
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The view that machines cannot give rise to surprises is due, I believe, to a fallacy to which philosophers and mathematicians are particularly subject. This is the assumption that as soon as a fact is…
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In an announcement that has stunned the computer industry, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan admitted that the Unix operating system and C programming language created by them is an ela…