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Go is a great tool now, but I’m convinced that like perl, it will be ten times as good when ninety percent of the community moves on. https://www.b7j0c.org/blog/joys_of_a_mature_community.html…
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Much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification. Fred Brooks, No Silver Bullet (1986)…
More on laziness/strictness
I have come to the conclusion that neither an eager (a/k/a strict, e.g. most languages) nor lazy (a/k/a total, e.g. Haskell) language is vastly superior to the other. They each have tradeoffs, because…
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Now about “type safety” meme. Again, if the world consist only of numbers and abstract ideas, then, perhaps, it could make some sense. However, processes are not “linear”, classifications are not “tre…
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When you lack the ability to express an abstraction within your language you compensate with verbosity and imprecision. This is as true in English as it is in programming languages.…
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I mean, I’m a computer guy. I’ve seen trends rise and fall before I even bothered to really sink into them (because I was busy doing other stuff). In a way I feel like I"m losing touch with techn…
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A name’s length should not exceed its information content. For a local variable, the name i conveys as much information as index or idx and is quicker to read. Similarly, i and j are a better pair of…
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Turns out through the S3 API you can actually spin up EC2 instances, and my key had been spotted by a bot that continually searches GitHub for API keys. Amazon AWS customer support informed me this ha…
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But to anyone who has ever wondered whether using m4 macros to configure autoconf to write a shell script to look for 26 Fortran compilers in order to build a Web browser was a bit of a detour, Brooks…
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Today’s Unix/Posix-like operating systems, even including IBM’s z/OS mainframe version, as seen with 1980 eyes are identical; yet the 31,085 lines of configure for libtool still check if <sys/stat.…
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This is commonly believed, but in fact, a type checker introduces bugs. It shifts the cost of a certain class of mistakes so much that the kinds of mistakes people make in the presence of a type chec…
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the number of software packages that help people read mail and news and waste enormous amount of time in front of the computer are legion, but they tend to make people spend /more/ time on these tasks…