Another look at (old) Distributed Systems
Remember watching this talk by Michael Bernstein many years ago, and some good things are worth revisiting, so I re-watched it today. It’s backed by some reading material too. Part 1 These days I’m…
Computing
52 posts
Ye Olde Linux
An account of “Linus-as-Martin Luther” from an article in Salon, 25 years ago: Linus Torvalds is an information-age reformer cut from the same cloth. Like Luther, his journey began while studying for…
Language comparison
Came across this pros/cons table recently (some un-named company, when deciding on micro-service language-of-choice): Mostly agree, except that * We do have generics in Go (as of 1.18) and "..…
“Don’t teach coding!”
(“… until you read this book)” One of a spate of really good Racket books: https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Don%27t+Teach+Coding%3A+Until+You+Read+This+Book-p-9781119602637 Clear, straightforward chapte…
On Urbit
(content here copy-pasted from this HN thread, because I thought it was a good summary) What is Urbit? Urbit is a virtual machine OS for server-side applications. If you imagine a future in which i…
License to Share
I came across Drew DeVault's essay on source code licenses, from a few years ago, and agreed with the first few lines: I agreed with the first few lines of this essay: I generally preferred the…
Cycles of threading
From this HN thread I gotta say, as a programmer "of a certain age", a lot of recent advances have an everything-old-is-new-again feel to me. When I first heard of "threads" in th…
Flexibility vs consistency
The "tragic tradeoff" in programming languages: I still remember a wonderful presentation by Damian Conway a number of years ago about all of the great ways Perl 6 could turn into whatever…
Yield curves
Playing around with Wolfram Mathematica again for a bit: https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/accountwolfram/Published/YieldCurve.nb Notebook is viewable here.…
Unix blues
From the foreword to "The Unix Haters Handbook" by Donald Norman, author of previous works like "The Trouble with Unix: The User Interface is Horrid", and "The Design of Every…
Future systems
Post-Smalltalk systems A surprising find, in the comments section of a Youtube video, Alan Kay clarifying, in response to "he doesn't advocate using Smalltalk today, but didn't say what…
“Residential programming"
A terrible name for a revolutionary old idea. Why is source code in files? I’ve seen the Smalltalk solution to this, to have everything be “live” all the time, in the image. This talk presents Inte…