Archive for January, 2005
Monday, January 31st, 2005
From Todd Veldhuizen:
Babbage never succeeded in having his analytical engine finished. However, a father-and-son pair of Swedes, Georg and Edvard Scheutz, succeeded in building a working difference engine in 1843. It was clear that the drive toward computer miniaturization had already begun: Babbage's design was intended to be driven by ...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Saturday, January 29th, 2005
I laughed when I read this, especially when I realized that I used #11, #22, #33, #34, #48, #55, and #70 in a single email message to my students...
Then I realized that I've lost count of how many times people have said #43 to me...
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Thursday, January 27th, 2005
*ahem* I have two announcements:
1) Miles Thibault, a former 49X students the University of Toronto, has set up a mailing list devoted to extensible programming. Everyone with an interest in next-generation programming systems is invited to join in.
2) Michelle Levesque, another former 49X student, will be presenting her comparison ...
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Wednesday, January 26th, 2005
When I first encountered open source years ago the idea of contributing really excited me. Unfortunately, I found little success in my attempts to help out. I have always wondered why that was, and now I think I know.
I first ran into Biopython when I started working in ...
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Wednesday, January 26th, 2005
I gave a talk at PyGTA last night on what we're doing to integrate Python into the undergraduate curriculum at the University of Toronto, and what I'll be doing with my PSF grant to promote Python in science and engineering. I was pleased at how many people turned out, ...
Posted in Student Projects, Teaching | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, January 19th, 2005
Mike Gunderloy's book Coder to Developer was one of my top 10 for 2004 (and the sequel, Developer to Designer, looks every bit as good). He has just posted an article on "User Choice, Customization, and Confusion" that says a lot of sensible things.
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, January 19th, 2005
A web-friend of mine just interviewed for a tech lead position at Google. Here's a (slightly tidied up and anonymized) version of their experiences:
Most of my work, at least at the start, should be in "production software"--googlese for the software that helps keep Google's amazingly huge distributed system running ...
Posted in Teaching | 64 Comments »
Tuesday, January 18th, 2005
My ACM Queue article on extensible programming systems just got slashdotted. Once again, it's clear that most of the posters haven't bothered to read the article: even the headliner seems to think that I believe programmers will all be typing XML tags five years from now.
The article's real point ...
Posted in Extensible Programming | 3 Comments »
Monday, January 17th, 2005
A couple of years ago (summer of 2003, actually), I noticed something that's been nagging me ever since. When I log into a computer, the first thing I fire up is email. When my students log in, the first thing they run is an instant messaging client. ...
Posted in Student Projects, Teaching | 7 Comments »
Sunday, January 16th, 2005
There's been a minor blog storm over the last few weeks about Guido
van Rossum's proposal to add optional type declarations to Python [1]. Guido believes it will help catch errors before
code is run (or in sections of code that aren't exercised by unit
tests), but other people say no, the ...
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